


Bagel Bites

by Feynite



Series: The Bagel AU [2]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bagel AU, F/M, Fluff, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-29
Updated: 2016-06-22
Packaged: 2018-04-28 19:34:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 30,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5103086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Feynite/pseuds/Feynite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Random bits and things belonging in the Bagelverse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Wicked Grace, Part One

**Author's Note:**

> The fact that I created something that can accurately be described as 'the bagelverse' fills me with both deep shame and a strange sort of pride.

“I think his lips might actually be legitimately perfect. To go with his voice. Like it’s a matched set, you know?”

“We were supposed to  _stop_  talking about this!” Cullen objects, about a third of the way into the evening.

Josephine reaches over and pats him on the forearm.

“Don’t worry. We’ll go back to objectifying you instead soon enough. It will be much easier after I win the shirt off of your back again.”

Cullen scowls.

“That is not what I meant!”

“He tasted  _sweet_ ,” she says. “Not that it’s totally a surprise. I’m starting to think he might live off of sugar. Like he’s actually a very large hummingbird in disguise.”

Sera scrunches her nose.

“Ew. I think I need more to drink if we’re gonna start talking about how Elfy the Baker Elf  _tastes.”_

“I meant his mouth!” she says.

“Sweet up top and salty down below?” Bull asks, waggling his eyebrows.

Cullen groans and buries his head between his hands.

“Why do I do this? Why do I even come here?” he asks.

Dorian leans over, and pats him on the back.

“Because without us, you’re a shambling wreck of a man with no social life,” he says.

Slowly, Cullen lifts his head, and looks at him.

“I was being  _rhetorical.”_

“We didn’t actually, uh, get there,” she admits.

Varric raises an eyebrow.

She has the unnerving suspicion that he’s taking mental notes on this whole debacle.

“What, you guys just went straight for it?” Bull asks, with a whistle, and a lewd gesture. “Skip the foreplay, lube up and buy a first class ticket to pound town?”

She clears her throat.

“No, I mean… we just kissed. A lot. And then he asked for another date, and, uh, left.”

Silence.

Long, disbelieving silence.

It’s Varric who breaks it.

“Shit,” he says. “I can’t believe  _Cassandra_  won the bet.”


	2. Wicked Grace, Part Two

She is going to murder her friends.

She can see the headlines now. ‘Dalish Bagel Shop Owner Goes on Violent Killing Spree After Night of Wicked Grace Turns South’.

She’s going to kill them, but it’s her own fault, really, for actually bringing Solas into their presence. She should have known better. She  _did_ know better, but then Solas had asked her for something. With his voice.

…No, she’s not going to offer up any better explanation than that.

Anyway, Solas’ stupid, Choirs of the Heavens voice and its ability to produce sounds with meanings is what gets them here. At Wicked Grace night. With half the table just sort of squinting at him.

It is, of course, the half of the table who have never been to his bagel shop. Ostensibly the loyal, reliable half, she would think - Iron Bull, Varric, and Cullen - but she can sense the looming disaster in the air.

“I’m not seeing it,” Varric finally declares.

“Yeah,” Bull agrees. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice jaw. But I’m not getting the Sculpted Perfection of a Thousand Muses vibe. Kind of a let down.”

“You didn’t mention he was bald,” Cullen throws in.

“Hard to make that sound appealing, though, innit? Like, ‘oh his smooth and eggish head, gleaming like the shine off a polished fucking bowling ball’ or some shite,” Sera reasons.

Sera will be the first to die.

So sad. So sad.

Solas blinks, and then raises his eyebrows, and then glances towards her.

She returns his stare and folds her arms.

“I might have described you to them once or twice,” she admits.

Dorian snorts.

“Eyes like two pieces of the sky, lips perfectly wrought to suit his melodious voice, legs surely granted to him by the providence of a fiendish desire demon…” he begins listing.

She narrows her eyes at him.

“I rescued you when you and Bull got stuck,” she reminds him.

The levity drops immediately from his face.

“You swore never to bring that up!”

Bull just chuckles, a note of fond reminiscence in the sound.

“Alright,” Josephine intervenes. “Are we here to gossip like old wives, or play?”

Sweet, sweet Josephine. Her bagel treachery may yet be forgiven.

“Maker, I’ve never wanted you to deal so badly in my life,” Cullen blurts.

Unfortunately, the game fails to provide her friends with enough of a distraction from their sport, and the conversation soon turns back to the perilous grounds of her ability to describe people’s body parts with accuracy. Which she doesn’t think they should really be  _so_  fixated on.

Really.

“Did you know she kept referring to you as Hot Wrong Bagel Man?” Varric asks.

“I did not,” Solas concedes.

She’s trying very hard to pretend that this isn’t one of the most mortifying experiences of her life.

Probably failing, judging by the way she’s given up trying to meet Solas’ gaze and has instead buried her face into her hands, and isn’t even  _pretending_  to play any more.

They’re having too much fun with this.

She kind of wants the ground to open up and swallow her whole, and it must be said, she generally has a pretty high threshold for humiliation. She has a reputation in her clan for being the kid who held out the longest on the subject of refusing to wear clothes.

Even Cullen seems to be in on the action here, though.

“I thought you would be taller,” he says. “She kept on describing you as tall.”

“I am sorry to disappoint,” Solas replies.

“Way she was going on about your shoulders I figure you’d be built more, myself,” Iron Bull admits.

“I think she was right about your bone structure. It is quite elegant,” Josephine offers.

“Thank you,” he replies.

Ugh. This is ruinous. These traitors are giving him  _all_  the ammunition. She’s never going to win an argument with him again when he knows he can just blink and his ridiculous, beautiful eyelashes will probably sweep all of her thoughts away.

As the evening progresses, she curls more and more into herself.

Bull, Varric, and Josephine are the first to notice and let up. Then Dorian. Sera goes on the longest, but she’s never been great at reading the atmosphere for that kind of thing. The teasing has degenerated to something perilously close to outright bullying, and it’s pretty obvious that they took it a little too far.

She might  _actually_  have to kill them.

It takes her a while to notice that the atmosphere of the game has changed significantly from it’s normal pattern, too.

As fun as these weekly meet-ups are, they’ve settled in to something of an established trend. Josephine is the likeliest winner and the best bluffer. Cullen usually loses but doesn’t tend to bring a lot of money with him in the first place. Varric bets the most and loses nearly as often as Cullen, to the point where she’s started to suspect that he secretly uses the game as a means of funnelling cash to them when they need it.

Everyone else can mix it up depending on the odds and the evening. She’s doing abysmally tonight, for obvious reasons. Things seem to be moving as usual, with a bit of an unpredictable undercurrent that she chalks up to her friends’ remorse over having embarrassed her a little  _too_  much, and the simple element of a new player.

And then Solas starts winning.

And winning.

And winning.

By the end of the evening the table is silent, and he’s smiling serenely from over his mountain of earnings, including Cullen’s shirt and a pair of Sera’s star-shaped earrings.

She looks at him, and then looks around the table, and lets out an amused snort. Some of the awful clenching in her gut eases.

“I said you were smart, too,” she admits.

“All fine compliments, coming from someone who smiles like the sunrise, and could cut the fabric of the world on the edge of her wit,” he tells her, with uncommon softness, and a tiny smile.

Her heart does its stupid flip-flop thing that it always seems to do when he looks at her like that. 

Reaching over, she cups his cheek, and leans in and steals a kiss, and absolutely everyone at the table can eat it because his lips  _are_  perfect so it’s only true so there.

There’s a moment of awkward silence.

“Well, damn. Now we’re not even allowed to be mad that he cleaned us out,” Dorian finally grumbles.


	3. Taste Testing

She’s eaten Orlesian bagels before, of course.

You don’t pick a side in a war without considering the competition, even if one side of that competition is Orlesian. And you just so happen to be Dalish. And a Marcher. But she wants to make it perfectly clear that this isn’t purely political - Orlesian bagels suck entirely on their own merits, and she’s had some that are actually from Orlais, supposedly from the finest bakeries in Val Royeaux, so, she knows.

She doesn’t like them.

Which is why the fact that she’s currently holding one in a napkin is a mystery for the ages.

…A mystery which is probably answered by the stupidly gorgeous man currently sitting across from her, fingers tented, expression weirdly hopeful and just a little bit encouraging.

She sighs, and breaks off a piece, and pops it into her mouth.

Sweet.

Dense.

Cooked as perfectly as it could be, all things considered.

The honey flavour is stronger than usual.

And it does, she will concede, seem to have less of the dreaded heaviness than she’d expect.

Solas leans forward a little.

“Well?” he asks.

“It’s the best Orlesian bagel I’ve ever had,” she tells him, as she sets the rest of it down on the table.

He purses his lips.

“The recipe is derived from the oldest bagel recipe in the world,” he tells her, like this is somehow going to be important. As further evidence for his status as a history nerd, it might have been compelling, except, of course, they’d open and shut the case on that during their  _first date._

“I can believe that,” she tells him. “They probably didn’t just have donuts back then.”

He frowns, and his nose does that angry, scrunchy thing it does when he thinks people are being stupid for no good reason.

“Stop calling my bagels inferior donuts!”

“I will stop calling them inferior donuts when you start baking  _actual bagels!”_  

He stands up, and she folds her arms and leans back in her chair.

“That is the best bagel in the world. You simply cannot admit it,” he insists.

She snorts.

He throws an arm into the air.

“Why do I even bother trying? Here I am making luxury baked goods while you’re busily selling  _chewy toast_  on the other side of the street,” he grumbles.

She rolls her eyes.

“It’s not my fault that you travelled the world looking for all the most delicious foods and still couldn’t escape having the taste buds of a four-year-old,” she tells him. “Not everything has to be dessert, you know.”

“I am not  _that_  keen on sweets,” he insists.

She slants a pointed look at his menu, on which there are approximately two items that might not be described as sweet. And one of them is coffee. Which he only serves begrudgingly, because people expect it and ask for it and he’d lose a lot of business if he didn’t have it.

“The restaurant has a  _theme,”_  he tells her, lifting his chin slightly. It gives her a perfect look at the angles of his face, which are flawlessly lit by the light streaming in through the window beside them.

He looks like a painting.

“Well. I suppose I should give you credit for at least figuring out that my place was the best place to get breakfast,” she concedes, with a deep internal sigh.

His mouth twists a little.

She raises an eyebrow.

“What?” she asks.

“What?” he replies.

“What was with that look?”

“What look? I made no look.”

Narrowing her eyes, she stands up. His hands fall to his sides as she moved in front of him, and stares him down.

And waits.

His gaze flits to her mouth.

When he leans forward, she exercises her tremendous wealth of personal restraint, and bars his kiss with a gentle finger to his lips.

“What. Was that. Look,” she asks him again.

He sighs.

“I loathe everything you make except for the milkshakes,” he admits.

She retracts her hand, and shakes her head at him, baffled.

“What?”

“It is - it is just all so…  _sad._  Why do you make sad food? You’re not a sad person. I just, I cannot fathom it. Your menu reads like it was written by someone who has entirely abandoned the concept of joy and accepted the inevitability of a bland and pitiless life,” he tells her. “It is defeat, apathy, and despair, and it is entirely incongruous to you.”

Taking a step back, she glares at him.

“That is ridiculous, my menu is excellent! Everyone eats at my place!” she snaps.

“Everyone eats there because they like  _you!_  The only reason I ever went back was because I could not fathom how someone so breathtakingly full of life and beauty could run a restaurant fuelled by culinary defeat! And your milkshakes are delicious,” he admits.

She stares at him, not sure if she’s still insulted or weirdly touched.

“The milkshakes are sweeter than sin. Just accept it, vhenan, your taste buds are broken,” she declares.

He narrows his eyes at her.

“I am  _not_  a giant hummingbird.”

Letting out a tremendous sigh, she throws her hands up in the air.

“Do my friends repeat  _everything_  to you?!” she wonders.

“Yes!”

They stare one another down, the unfinished bagel still resting on the table between them. She checks the clock. Half an hour, and then she’ll have to cross the street, and probably spend another day stewing over how Wrong Solas is About Bagels.

He glances at the abandoned baked good on the table, and his expression, for a moment, is just a little bit… hurt.

Not that she’s precisely immune to some dismay over his assessment of her cooking, either.

“…You really think my menu’s terrible?” she asks him.

“I do,” he admits. “But… I suppose other people seem to like it. Even pitiably mistaken souls must need somewhere to eat.”

She rolls her eyes.

“You honestly think everything I make is too sweet?” he wonders.

“Absolutely,” she tells him, and yet she can’t seem to help inching back towards him again. “But I think it tastes good on you.”

Then she tilts forward, and kisses him; not apologetic, because they’re both, to be quite honest, giant assholes about this. It’s war, after all. But at least they’re sincere. He slips his arms around her, and she licks her way into his mouth. It tastes more like toothpaste at the moment, to be honest, but that’s pretty fine, too.

He sighs when she steps back.

“I suppose it is all somewhat subjective in the end,” he declares.

“No. That’s quitter talk. You’re just wrong,” she tells him.

Then she winks, and smacks him playfully on the ass before she heads out of the door, and back to her own battlefield trenches.


	4. Rainy Morning

Solas is wrong about bagels, but he has pretty good taste in books.

Lavellan discovers this the second time she sleeps over at his place. It’s raining when she wakes up, late in the morning. A lazy Saturday. Cassandra and Leliana have the run of her shop; Cole and Abelas are looking after Solas’. There’s nowhere in particular that she needs to be, and so she stretches, reaching out a hand and finding empty sheets beside her.

Not a huge surprise; it’s almost ten o’clock.

She climbs out of the bed, and pulls on a pair of boxers and one of Solas’ sweaters, and pads out to find him sitting on his couch, book in hand. His apartment’s pretty nice, if small; kitchen crammed into the living room, no television, but bookshelves on every spare scrap of wall, and big windows that look out over an empty lot. Laptop closed on the tiny kitchen table. She yawns and flops down onto the cushion next to him, and slumps against his shoulder.

He has such nice shoulders.

It’s ridiculous.

He leans over and kisses her forehead, and after a moment he shifts, and she blinks, and just kind of gives up and curls into his lap instead.

He stares down at her, amused.

“Did I tire you out?” he asks.

Smug bastard.

“Absolutely,” she tells him, though, and when she does his cheeks flush like he didn’t just start the conversation on a sexy note himself.

She sighs, willing to be caught looking at him in adoration for a moment, and he reddens further and then shifts, brushing his fingers down the side of her face before he goes back to his book. The rain patters against the windows, and the light is grey, and she is tired and cozy and he is very warm. And his sweater smells like baked bread.

After a minute, though, even counting his freckles gets a bit dull. Her gaze drifts to the pages of his book instead. She’s not really angling to get more than a basic idea of what he’s reading. Some kind of historical autobiography - shocking. But after a while she finds herself reading along with him.

Not wholly coherently. Just bits and blurbs. Then more. When he moves to turn a page a little too quickly for her, she touches his hand, stalling him for a few seconds; once she’s caught up, she lets him go and nods.

He blinks down at her.

“I thought you had fallen asleep again. You are… reading with me?” he asks.

“Does it bother you?” she wonders.

“No,” he assures her, and he looks a little flustered, actually. “No, not all.”

She smiles up at him.

He looks down at her, fondly, and brushes a thumb across her temple.

“Good morning, by the way,” she says.

He sighs, content.

“Good morning,” he replies.


	5. Third Date (NSFW)

They get to the third date.

For something that was originally just going to be some kind of one-night-stand sexcapade, she thinks that’s probably impressive. And honestly she would  _love_  to chalk it up to some kind of polite restraint on her part, but she really would have absolutely jumped him the first night if not for the fact that it would bring an end to the conversation.

As it stands, they get through the third date, which happens at a  _museum_  and is somehow  _flawless_ , and make it back to her place, and he kisses her and turns to leave and she catches him by the elbow.

_Invite him in for coffee,_  her brain goes.

_No not that he hates coffee!_  It then suddenly and somewhat randomly reminds her. Because it’s not like anyone actually expects coffee when they get asked in for coffee, but maybe she should offer him a milkshake instead? The tackiest of innuendoes. Ugh. Or would he actually expect one then?

Her mouth is tingling and it’s a little cold out tonight, and his jacket is all crinkly in her fingers and she can feel his damn muscles through the cloth, and he tilts his head a little, just a little, before he turns back towards her and sweeps in for another kiss, and her mind just goes completely blank then for a few minutes.

Oxygen deprivation might have something to do with it.

The man kisses like he means it.

When they finally break apart his breath puffs, warm over her cold cheeks, and his eyelashes go flutter-flutter and okay.

Screw it.

“Want to come in and have sex?” she asks him.

He sort of stares at her, like he did the first time she asked him out. Not the second time, though, he was apparently ready for it by then, even though she basically marched into his shop between daytime rushes and just sort of gestured between them and shouted ‘tomorrow night?’ at him.

He blinks.

“Yes, very much so,” he finally says.

Which is good news because frankly she’s been having to get herself off on thoughts of him so much lately, it’s worth hoping that the real thing might at least take the edge off  _that._

She moves away from him long enough to fumble her keys in the lock, and they somehow manage to make it up to her apartment without doing something massively inappropriate in the elevator, which is a feat worthy of commendation. She barely gets her door closed, though, before he’s pressing her up against it, fumbling against her shirt and jacket and kissing the breath out of her again, so brilliantly warm compared to the cold door at her back.

She grabs his jeans by the belt loops and yanks his hips towards her, and he jumps as she grinds against him.

Her mind fills with the most vivid images of everything she’s wanted to do to him. Even the stupid little things, like nibbling his ridiculous, perfectly shaped ears, and kissing his freckles, and tracing his jawline with her fingertip, and finding out what his practically hypnotic voice sounds like when he’s moaning from pleasure.

Her fingers pop the top button of his pants and she unzips him, and he breaks off the kiss as she gets a hand into his fly..

She’s pretty sure she’s going to really like this part of him, too.

He takes her by the wrist, though, and pulls back, breaths a little heavy.

“I think we should  _at least_  get our jackets and shoes off, first,” he says. Raggedly.

She grins.

“You’re the one who pinned me to the door,” she reminds him.

He stares at her mouth.

Then he roughly begins shucking off his jacket and, with appreciable urgency, toeing off his shoes.

They end up leaving a trail of clothes out of the front entrance and stumbling onto her couch, which is a pretty nice couch, she must say. Part of her really wants to just take her time and unwrap him inch by inch, but there’s too much electricity in the air. That’ll have to wait, she supposes, and peels off her shirt and unclasps her bra, and barely gets it out of the way before he wraps his arms around her again and starts kissing a path down her neck.

His lips brush too softly in a couple of places, and she laughs.

She feels his mouth curve.

“You are  _ticklish_?” he asks, as if the idea is riveting.

“Maybe a little,” she admits.

He trails his fingers across her sides, and she bursts into laughter again, reaching back to catch his wrist. He grins and she takes her revenge by ducking down to kiss the freckles on his nose, and slips her free hand underneath his waistband. His pants are hanging around his knees and he looks ridiculous and gorgeous and his skin is very smooth, there, and just a little bit wrinkled from where the top of his jeans have pressed into him all day.

Somehow she finds herself just sort of looking at him again, while he just sort of stares back at her, and then she kisses his lips; soft and slow and exploratory, like she hasn’t just spent half the evening staring at them and the past little while having them pressed into her own. She gets a fresh feel for them, sweet and thorough, before both her hands come up to cradle his face, and she delves into his mouth with her tongue. And then she gets a feel for him there, too, as his palms slide warm around her waist. One of them dips down beneath her own pants. Trails down the skin of her lower back, and traces the top of her ass.

When she finally pulls back his lips are pink, and his cheeks are pink, and he looks a little dazed, and she honestly kind of feels a little dazed, too. And her heart does an awkward, weirdly happy flip in her chest.

“I neglected to bring a condom,” he says, all at once, like it’s just occurred to him.

She snickers.

“Bedroom drawer. Come on, we might as well do this properly,” she decides, and moves back a little. She takes his hand, and he steps out of his jeans, and she feels him so keenly as he follows her. His touch around hers, his heat at her back, his footsteps quiet behind her own.

He sort of looks around her apartment as if he’s realizing the rooms have actual stuff in them for the first time as she opens up the drawer, and produces a bottle of Antivan ‘intimacy cream’ and a packet of condoms. Her place is clean and small, but hers and hers alone, which she’s pretty grateful for now. The water pressure sucks and there’s a giant crack in the ceiling, and the heating works pretty sporadically, but at least it’s not like Cullen’s ‘open air’ loft or Bull’s ‘crash pad of a thousand people’.

She suddenly feels vaguely self-conscious about her lack of bedframe, though. Solas strikes her as a ‘bedframe’ kind of guy.

At least she washed her sheets.

When he just sort of stands there again, for a minute, she feels the first real brush of uncertainty.

“You change your mind?” she asks him.

He blinks, and looks utterly taken aback.

“Not at all,” he assures her. “Unless you have?”

She smiles and shakes her head, and works her way over towards him. He’s got nothing on but his underwear, now, and she’s still in her pants. She shimmies her way out of them, so at least they’re on even ground.

He just stands there, at first, so it’s a little bit of a surprise when he suddenly  _sweeps_  his arms around her and dives in for another kiss, and halfway picks her up. She can feel his heart beating in his chest, right where their skin meets, and it makes her think of the old endearment. Beating hearts and the word for the sort of person who’s supposed to make you feel this way.

“Ma vhenan,” she whispers to his lips.

He clutches her.

She freezes, because this  _the third date_  and you do not bust out the ancient elven endearments on _the third date,_  dammit, not even when you’re Dalish.

Her face burns and her stomach drops and she tries frantically to think of something to say to make that moment less weird and abrupt and inappropriate because, well, shit, that was weird and abrupt and inappropriate, and she’s just way too taken with him and  _he likes Orlesian bagels,_  she needs to focus on the big picture here before she ruins her life over his damn cheekbones and his beautiful voice and –

– and then he kisses her so fiercely she sees stars.

Actual. Stars.

Not even the ‘whoops teeth clacked ow’ kind of stars, but toe-curling, heat-pooling, what-even- _are-_ bagels-and-why-does-she-care kind of stars. She grips at his back and her breasts press against his chest and his heart thuds, just like hers, and his mouth is magic (and maybe actually  _magic_ , just a little, because he’s a mage and all) and she completely forgets that she even said anything.

Words?

What are words?

Who needs words?

His hands trail down towards her ass, and he grips it, and presses their hips together. Grinds his hardness into her, until she breaks away from his lips to let out a small gasp. One of his hands shifts between her legs, then, and presses against her through the fabric of her panties.

“Oh, fuck me,” she says.

“If you insist,” he replies, huskily.

Yes, she absolutely insists.

They lose their last remaining scraps of clothing somewhere between the doorway and the bed, and she reaches over to grab a condom off the nightstand while he’s licking at her breasts. When she turns back, though, he’s moved further down. He scoops her up by the ass and dips his face between her legs, and she barely has time to process what his obvious intentions are before his mouth is on her.

She grips the sheets.

“Holy shit,” she says, because he is  _phenomenal_  at kissing and that  _definitely_  applies to other uses for his mouth, too.

He doesn’t even pause to relish that reaction, either, or even to be just a little bit smug about it. He eats her like she’s one of his ridiculous dessert pastries, dragging his tongue and sucking at her clit, and she’s not normally all that noisy in bed – talkative, sometimes – but when he brings his fingers into the picture she finds herself making the most  _obscene_  noises she’s ever heard from her own mouth.

Eventually she makes him let up, though, panting and shaking and she’s pretty sure she came somewhere in all of that, but honestly the whole thing was so intense she’s not entirely convinced she came  _down_  again afterwards.

He’s flushed and hard and she takes her time, though, sliding the condom onto him. Getting a good look at him first, a feel for him in her hand. She was absolutely right; she loves this part of him, too. She loves it best when she bobs down and licks him, and he’s all soft skin and hard flesh, warm, perfect, and his breath hitches, and she’s absolutely sure, then, that she’s going to explore every inch of him in time. She’s going to get to know every single patch of skin on him; every hidden freckle and dimple and sensitive spot.

For now, she settles for running her fingers across the seams of his thighs once she gets him covered.

“Any particular positions in mind?” she asks him.

“All of them,” he says, eyes gleaming.

She laughs, and draws him to her, and they end up sticking with the basics, the first time. She wraps her legs around him and he sinks into her, and it’s a little clumsy at first, too many shifting hands and the angle’s off, but then his hips shift and she shoves a pillow under back and it’s  _glorious._  He fills her so perfectly it seems like yet more proof that he was designed by some spiteful deity to make her perfect man an Orlesian bagel enthusiast.

Well, jokes on that deity; she’ll take him anyway.

He goes gentle, at first, and she presses him close and drags him in, and urges him on, until they get the mattress banging into the wall. The slide of him in her is a delicious stretch.

He comes first, but the spark she feels at his shuddering halt, at the look on his face, is what tips her over, too. She pulls him down into her arms, then, and takes some time to do some of the little things on her list. She smooths her thumb over his lips, and maps the shell of his ears, and traces the dip in his chin. Runs her forefinger over a little scar on his brow, and trails her touch across the curve of his jaw. She even kisses his eyelashes, until he laughs and catches her hand, and presses a kiss to her pulse in return.

“What are you doing?” he asks her.

“You look like a work of art,” she tells him.

He stares, but she feels pretty unabashed about that statement. He  _does._  He’s beautiful, just like really good art is beautiful; the kind that’s not necessarily generically ‘pretty’, but has meaning. The best kind of art.

His expression softens, incredibly, and he looks touched and enchanted and probably a lot more attached than anybody should, just after casual third date sex and one measly little compliment.

“I think you are very beautiful as well,” he assures her, brushing a hand across her cheek.

Her heart flips over again.

“Want a blow job?” she asks him, waggling her eyebrows to try and break the soft, tender, ridiculously _intense_  mood hanging over them. Way too heavy for the third date. No. Bad mood, go back to whatever Hollywood romance you crawled out of.

He chuckles.

“Yes,” he says. “But first I think I’d like to bend you over the mattress.”

Oh.

Nice.

“We can work with that,” she agrees.


	6. Keys (NSFW)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From a prompt on my tumblr! <3

 

 

She gives him a key.

It’s not meant to be any kind of fancy, ceremonial, congratulations-our-relationship-has-entered-into-a-new-stage type of thing. But one of the perks of her apartment is that there’s this nook in the living room wall that was maybe meant to be a closet or space for a built-in at some point during the life of the place, but never got around to being finished.

As it happens, the nook is the perfect size for her chest freezer, which is extremely handy for storing excess foodstuffs from the restaurant and unofficially available to most of her friends because, honestly, everyone in their circle has finances that tend to fluctuate wildly. Poverty has stricken even Vivienne once or twice. 

It’s the Don’t Starve Freezer, as dubbed by Varric.

What it contains in any given week is a massive gamble, but so far - and thanks in large part to the friends-of-friends that Bull and Varric often gather armfuls of frozen food for - it’s significantly cut down on her restaurant food waste. And she’s pretty sure there was a solid month-long period where Anders subsisted entirely on her excess carrot muffins and potato salad, and considering he’s almost single-handedly keeping the poor of Kirkwall in decent medical care, that alone probably justifies its existence.

When she off-handedly explains it to Solas he looks at her, opens his mouth a little, blinks, closes his mouth, then opens it again and asks if he can donate to it.

She laughs.

“It’s not a ‘donate’ thing,” she says. “I’m not running a charity. It’s more like recycling.”

“May I help you recycle?” he asks, nevertheless. “I looked high and low for a decent food charity in this city when I set up shop, but I could find absolutely  _none.”_

She winces.

“Yeah, that’s Kirkwall for you. You know the chantry here once sued a clothing drive for using the same charity motto that they did? They  _sued_  a  _clothing drive_. The chantry doesn’t even  _do_  clothing drives!”

Solas looks appropriately appalled.

“How do the poor survive this city long enough to even become abundant?” he wonders.

She shrugs.

“Everyone just kind of pitches in, I guess.”

That just makes him look even more determined, however.

“All the more reason for me to lend a hand, in that case.”

But that’s how it starts, and soon enough he’s catching her after work and dumping boxes full of excess pies and apple cinnamon tarts and giant, chewy pretzels into her arms. And then taking them back and walking her home, instead. And then usually coming in with her, because it’s cold and late and she’s not going to leave a man donating free food to her friends to die of exposure on the billion-mile trek back to his own apartment building no matter  _what_  kind of bagels he makes.

And then, yes, of course they  _usually_  have sex. Because he’s gorgeous. And ridiculous. Although sometimes they just talk until they fall asleep, which is… not less embarrassing.

But it’s not always convenient to their schedules and sometimes they get mixed up and, well, she doesn’t want him waiting outside of her building with pie. People might get the wrong idea. Or something. Whatever the wrong idea might be. Like that she’s trading sexual favours for his food, maybe, which would be the worst assumption ever because she’d rather have the sexual favours and never suffer the indignation of having anyone believe, even for a moment, that she’d sleep with a man  _for_  Orlesian bagels and not  _in spite of_  them.

Right?

Right.

So she digs one of her spare keys out of the drawer in the bathroom (look, the apartment doesn’t have a lot of drawers, okay?) and leaves early to catch him before she has to open up shop.

It’s winter, and the air is brittle and bright but threatening more icy rain that snow. Her breath puffs and she’s maybe a little over-excited and sleep-deprived but absolutely  _not_  because she stayed up all night worrying about his reaction. That would be ridiculous.

She catches him at his door, and when he sees her he stares at her in surprise.

Then he smiles.

His lips curl and the light catches in his eyes and makes them look all sparkly and  _guh._ If music had started up right then, she wouldn’t have even thought it was strange. Sometimes she thinks he should live his life to the rhythm of some kind of gentle chorus. The tip of his nose is pink, and he’s wearing a knit blue scarf with toggles that look like teeth on the end.

It’s the most hideous clothing item she’s seen in her life.

She leans up and kisses him, and the warmth trickles down through her lips and all the way to her toes.

“Hello,” he murmurs, when she pulls back.

She snorts, and shoves the key in his hand.

“There. That’s a key to my place. Come and go whenever,” she eloquently informs him.

He stares at it like she just told him it would open the chamber containing the hidden libraries of ancient Elvhenan, or something. Which is…

Okay.

It’s remarkably touching.

His gloved hand closes around it, and she just sort of takes a step back and shrugs and waves, and moves to head over to her own side of the street.

He catches her elbow and reels her back, and she blinks at him and he kisses her forehead. His mouth feels unexpectedly molten against her wind-chilled skin.

“Thank you,” he murmurs.

She huffs.

“You’re over there all the time now anyway,” she says.

He puts his arms around her, and it’s cold. That’s the excuse she’s going to use if anyone asks why she was seen cuddling an Orlesian Bagel man by the side of the road. Not that their relationship is exactly a  _secret -_ it may, in fact, be the opposite of that - but still. Principles. She’s even on the same side of the street as his shop, so it’s probably  _some_  kind of blasphemy.

When she finally disentangles from him, Cassandra is waiting by the shop for her.

She crosses the street with an air of resignation. Her friend looks at her with an expression that’s trying - and failing - not to be a little bit smug.

“I was  _overcome_ with  _lust_ ,” she immediately asserts, fishing around for her keys. Her own, actual ones. Not any more gift keys. Though, to be honest, as far as gestures go it probably wasn’t even that special. All of her good friends have keys. Not that she’s ever given anyone a key without knowing them for at least a year before, but that’s beside the point.

Cassandra snorts.

“And the truth is?”

She sighs, and unlatches the door. Then flips off the security system.

“I gave him a key,” she admits.

Cassandra makes a sound that’s equal parts surprise and delight.

“You are moving  _so fast!”_  her friend exclaims, and then sighs, and that sigh implies a bevy of horrible romantic untruths. Things like ‘love at first sight’ and ‘this is so romantic’ and ‘oh, it’s just like in one of Varric’s terrible novels!’

She is  _not_  the protagonist of one Varric’s terrible novels.

…Yet.

Though she has heard some unsettling rumours about some kind of fantasy novel where a Dalish elf falls in love with the Dread Wolf, only the Dread Wolf is, inexplicably, disguised as a humble bald outcast. No mention of bagels, at least; to be honest she’s more comfortable with actual sacrilege than she is with the odds of Varric handling the intricacies of the Bagel War.

She fends off Cassandra’s further attempts to get non-existent ‘juicy details’ from her (which could possibly mean she tells her everything), and for the first while, the key doesn’t really see much use. Solas still mostly meets up with her after work, when he has something to drop off, and they’re both busy people, in general.

Then she goes to Wicked Grace night, and the topic of the evening is casual artistic critique of Sera’s latest acts of street vandalism and an impromptu viewing of all the vacation photos that Krem has been sending Bull from Tevinter. Which then leads to Dorian waxing nostalgic until he actually loses a hand to Cullen. The subsequent revenge match is entertaining, but long.

She heads home to find Solas napping on her couch.

For a minute she just sort of stares at him. He’s twisted at an angle which suggests he fell asleep there by accident. There’s a book on the floor, and the Netflix screen asking if anyone’s still watching. His cheek is pressed up against one of her cushions, and his breaths are soft and even. The gentle rise and fall of his chest under his sweater mesmerises her for a minute.

She shucks off her coat and shoes, drops her purse by the door and pads over, wriggling her toes against the carpet at the tingling mix of feelings in her.

For a minute more, she just sort of looks at him. But as weirdly compelling as the image is, he can’t possibly be comfortable like that, so finally she reaches over and gently touches his shoulder.

He wakes up slowly. Looks at her, first, and then around the room.

“Hey,” she says. “Were you waiting for me?”

It takes him a minute to process her words.

When he does, he sucks in a breath, and lets it out again.

“Yes. My apologies. I had thought you might return in an hour or so, and perhaps I could make you something to eat, but it seems I fell asleep,” he says. Then he blinks, and glances at the clock.

“Things ran late tonight,” she explains.

“I should go,” he says.

“Nah,” she tells him, and that’s all it takes for him to relents. She leads him - soft and pliant and still half asleep - into her room.

She gets him reasonably undressed and in her arms, blankets cocooned around them both, and he falls asleep and, honestly, it doesn’t take her long to follow him down.

In the morning she wakes up first, and watches Solas for a little bit. He looks tired. Long day yesterday, she thinks. One of those fancy parties in Hightown had commissioned him for a bagel platter, and she’d seen Cole manning the front, which was usually a good sign that Solas and Abelas were in the back making enough Orlesian bagels to drown the city.

The whole street had smelled like honey.

She leaves him to keep on resting - it’s his day off as well as hers - and goes to see what she can scrounge up for breakfast.

Pancakes, she decides. He can drown his in syrup if he wants. She gets started, humming lightly to herself, and pauses midway to retrieve her phone, and checks her messages while the pancakes cook. It’s peaceful. Almost serene. The end result sees fluffy and light stacks of pancakes, satisfyingly shaped, and she smiles at them and then goes back to the bedroom to nudge Solas awake.

A soft little grunt catches her attention.

Pausing by the door, she peers in, and then stills.

Solas is already awake.

The blankets are strewn about him. She can see most of his chest and upper body, though. His cheeks are flushed, eyes half-lidded and turned towards the wall. Lips parted. One of his hands has dipped below the blankets, and there’s a distinctive wrist motion going on there.

A rush of heat drops through her, and for a few seconds she just stares. Transfixed. The muscles in his arm move, and he shifts his cheek slightly against the pillow. The sheets rustle a little as he speeds up, his breaths going ragged.

Oh.

Oh, she really, really wants to watch him do that with a clearer line of sight.

She makes herself pull back, though, suddenly aware that she’s spying on him, and that, regardless of their relationship, he might not be comfortable with it. Her own flush of arousal follows her as she makes her way back into the kitchen, and after a minute she shoves the pancakes into the oven to keep warm.

Eggs.

She’ll make some eggs, and then… probably he’ll be done.

That turns out to be a good call. Not too long after she starts, she hears him slip into the bathroom - and another jolt of warmth washes through her just thinking about him finishing that little interlude - and when he comes back out she fishes out the syrup and the pancakes, and endures what has to be the most sexually frustrated breakfast of her life.

“So,” he asks, after thanking her for the food. “Any thoughts on what you wanted to do today?”

“Watch you touch yourself,” she says.

There’s a pause.

…What.

What  _even_  just came out of her traitorous mouth?!

Solas reddens, and shifts in his seat. 

Realization dawns.

It doesn’t, at least, seem to upset him.

He clears his throat.

“I doubt that could manage to fill an entire day,” he says.

Oh, what the hell.

“You’ve got a pretty good refractory period. But we could do other things too, I guess,” she offers. “Watch you touch yourself, watch some television. Watch you touch yourself, go shopping. Watch you touch yourself, go out to dinner. Watch you touch yourself, see a movie. That kind of a thing.”

He’s managed to work up a truly gorgeous blush by the time she finishes, and it seems to take him a minute to compose his response.

“Unless you’re not interested,” she says.

“I am very interested,” he replies. “Though some alterations to the schedule would suit me more, I think. Perhaps a trade? You watch me, and then I watch you?”

She mulls that over. His eyes on her while she… yes.

“Okay. Yes. Good, that is the schedule, now,” she declares.

Then she stands up from the table, and tugs on the sweater he put back on - and thanks every deity she knows that the heater is working right today, because yesterday this plan wouldn’t have flown just because of the cold. She leads him back into the bedroom and helps him undo all the useless work he did in getting dressed.

When she slides his pants down his hips, he comes rather dramatically free, already standing at attention, so to speak, and close enough to kiss.

So she does.

His breath hitches.

“Change of plans?” he asks.

Hmm. Almost.

“Maybe later,” she suggests, and moves up and kisses his lips instead.

Then she nudges him into spreading out on the bed, and settles back, and drinks her fill of the sight of him. He stares at her in return, for a moment, and the way his gaze dips down over her curves gives her a bolt of inspiration.

“Oh, there’s an idea,” she says, and stands up, and wraps her hands around the hem of her shirt.

He watches her.

Slowly, she lifts it; just enough to reveal a tiny patch of skin.

“Touch yourself,” she tells him.

His hand drifts down to his length, and closes over it, and starts to move. She watches the careful drag of his grip. His beautiful fingers stroking his skin. He has a freckle, right near the base; just the lightest little dot and for some reason she finds it fascinating.

As he moves, she lifts up her shirt. He watches her in turn, and her only regret for this plan is the brief moment where the fabric blocks her view. But only the shirt will do that; from her on out, she thinks, she’s good, and she stares, alternating between his hand on himself and the look on his face.

She unhooks her bra, next. But it’s not until she’s slowly letting her pants slide down her hips that he bites his lip. White teeth on plush, pink skin. She’s so turned on she almost tackles him then and there, but she can’t stop staring at him, either. It’s like so many things about him are so good, she can never decide what to do with him.

He caresses himself, and speeds up, and she slides off her panties - she was going to need to change them anyway - and puts some swing in her hips as she moves back towards him. Gets a good view, up close.

He reaches for her with his free hand, and she catches it, and presses a kiss to his palm.

“Beautiful,” she tells him.

When he finally comes, she leans in to kiss him.

He kisses her back, caught somewhere between urgently passionate and increasingly languid. Her tongue delves into his mouth. Her hand slips between her legs, finally giving in to the urgency of her own arousal. She presses against herself. Not lingering. Quick, to draw herself to completion; she can give him more of a show later.

He stares at her, and then reaches out and cups one of her breasts, and the bolt of sensation shoots straight from her nipple and down to where her fingertips are pressed.

It doesn’t take her long to finish, all things considered.

When she does, she leans against him.

“So that’s round one,” she says, through heavy breaths.

He chuckles, and reaches over, and pulls her into his arms.

“We should do Round Two at my place,” he suggests, while she kisses his cheek.

“Sure,” she agrees, with a shrug. “Any particular reason, or just bored of being here?”

He pauses a moment, running his thumb across her shoulder in gentle circles. Then he sits up, nearly dislodging her, before he reaches over the side of the bed and fishes up his pants again. She blinks at him, and then blinks once more when he presses something small and cold and metal into her palm.

It’s a key.

She swallows.

“Perhaps to celebrate?” he suggests, with only the faintest note of uncertainty.

Probably, she tells herself, he just wants it to be even. She gives him a key to her place, so he gives her one to his. Sounds like the kind of thing he’d want to do. Except he’s looking at her like maybe it  _is_  some kind of fancy, ceremonial, congratulations-our-relationship-has-entered-into-a-new-stage type of thing.

For him.

She definitely doesn’t get weirdly touched and moved and all fluttery on the inside about it, though.

“…Okay,” she says.

It’s possible her voice comes out unusually quiet. Maybe even with a waver in it.

Solas smiles.

She closes her fingers around the key, and smiles back.


	7. Birthday Cake (NSFW)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Combined three different prompts in one for this one!

Solas doesn’t tell her that his birthday’s coming up. She only finds out about it through Cole, in fact.

“He does not like people to know,” Cole says.

Figures. Of course he doesn’t. Why not, she wonders? A vanity thing? Fear of mortality? A dislike of parties? No, definitely not that last one. Even when he’s catering them he seems to enjoy them, and when she took him to Vivienne’s New Year’s party he basically spent the whole evening drinking and smiling and asking her to dance and making  _extremely_  cutting observations about Kirkwall’s upper-crust, and just in general having the most glorious time out of anyone there.

She smiles a little, remembering the chill air and his warm hands, and lips that tasted like champaign, and nearly being  _extremely_  inappropriate on Vivienne’s balcony.

She comes back out of the reminiscence to find Cole smiling one of his tiny little smiles back at her.

Right.

Birthdays.

Well, it probably doesn’t matter why he hates it. She doesn’t actually care what his age is, so he can sit on the number if it makes him more comfortable. But it’s still a birthday. That’s… meaningful. Somehow.

Definitely not just the first good excuse she’s had to spoil him rotten.

Not that she wants to.

…Alright she wants to. For some reason. Possibly pertaining to her enduring and giddy infatuation with him.

“I am kidnapping you for several hours, Cole,” she says.

“Oh. Alright. I’ll have to go tell Abelas,” Cole replies.

“Don’t let Solas know!” she instructs him, firmly, and then dashes across the street to go tell Cassandra to call Leliana to cover for her shift. Leliana owes her a favour anyway for last week’s harrowing Nug Sitting incident. She yanks open the door.

“Cassandra, I’m taking off recklessly for the day,” she declares.

Cassandra looks unimpressed.

“It’s Solas’ birthday,” she adds.

Cassandra’s face lights up.

She flees back onto the street before things can get weird.

“Are you going to bake him a cake?” Cassandra calls after her, before the door swings shut.

“No!” she lies.

Shit. What kind of a cake can she make that he would actually like, and that wouldn’t offend her every sensibility to the point of madness? And that wouldn’t compete with his own stuff, because she can concede, when it comes to the inexplicable sweet treats her adores, his skill is respectable.

And very discerning.

She’s not making him bubblegum milkshakes, that’s stupidly sentimental and they’re not cakes and wouldn’t count for much anyway.

She takes a minute to retrieve Cole and drags him to the grocery store, and she scowls over her options before a recipe sweeps into her mind, the best she’s probably going to conjure on short notice. She heads for the produce aisle, and sends Cole off with firm instructions to think of three things Solas definitely likes - that are not Orlesian bagels because principles - and that he can make in a few hours. That way, she figures, there will at least be something 100% guaranteed to suit him for his birthday.

The cake, she decides, and what else? Is she seriously just going to feed him sweets all day?

…Screw it. It’s his birthday. She’s going to feed him sweets all day.

Her phone blips and she checks it to find that he’s sent her a text. He’s off today - still no mention of it being his birthday - but he wants to know if they can meet up for dinner.

She considers her options.

‘Come over to my place and we can order in?’ she suggests. ‘Gotta do a lot of stuff.’

He answers her pretty quickly.

‘That suits me perfectly.’

_Gift,_  she decides. She definitely needs to get him a gift, too. Something… damn. Something good. Not that she’s got a lot of surplus cash hanging around, but she can at least get him something worth having. Right? Right.

She just has to think of what that might be.

But first things first - groceries. Cole comes and finds her with his basket heavy with ingredients, and she pays and they end up taking the bus to her apartment, and then carrying the haul up the stairs because the elevator’s broken.

Solas texts her again while they’re unloading everything into her tiny kitchen. Nothing about his birthday, she notes. He wants to know if there’s anything he can cook for dinner instead of getting take-away.

‘No don’t bother’, she texts back, and then catches the bag of sweet potatoes before they tumble off of the counter.

“How did you even know it was his birthday?” she wonders.

“Abelas told me,” Cole admits. “He thought I should tell you.”

“ _Abelas?”_  she asks, pausing mid-reach. “Abelas who thinks I have no taste and wishes my shop would burn to the ground and once said I ‘scurried’ from my ‘accursed bread hut’?”

Solas as the proprietor of an Orlesian bagel shop still sometimes baffles her. Abelas, on the other hand, is only surprising insofar as it always kind of surprises her in that he’s in the food service industry at all. With his sparkly lip gloss and his perpetual scowl and truly ridiculous hair, he always looks sort of like he’s just wandered away from his pop idol sensation group and somehow gotten lost in Lowtown. 

“He likes you,” Cole asserts, which is the most ridiculous thing she’s ever heard him say. Including that one time he just started reciting a random poem about drowning for no apparent reason.

Well, whatever. 

Maybe Cole’s misread the situation. At least it worked out for her.

It’s pretty hard for more than one person to operate in her kitchen at a time, so she leaves him to prepare his profiteroles and strawberry tarts and honey-hazelnut cookies while she heads back out again and hopes for some kind of inspiration to strike on the gift-giving front. She glares at the shops in the mall and feels profoundly let down by capitalism at large when nothing immediately jumps out at her. Here she is, looking for a thing to buy, and no one is selling it.

No one can even suggest what it might be.

Cooking utensils are right out. He already has better than she can afford. Books he’s very picky about. Not that she blames him, but it doesn’t help her search much. She checks out the book store just the same though, and thinks about maybe just getting him a novelty mug or something, but that seems wholly inadequate.

He needs a gift.

A good gift.

Shit. Why does everything she can think of feel so… lacking?

Although…

She pauses as the thought occurs to her, and considers. There’s not a whole lot of time left in the day. And if any of her clan ever found about it she’d never live it down. The traditionalists would tut at her to no end. Gifts are really only supposed to be exchanged under very rare circumstances, but most Dalish ignore that tradition except for when it comes to  _handmade_  gifts. Which are very, very intimate.

The ‘close family and married couples’ kind of intimate.

Probably much too intimate for this.

And what would she even make him? Apart from food, which doesn’t really count?

It’s a stupid idea, she decides. 

But there’s a craft supply store that sells some specialty goods. Just across the street. They would have some sylvanwood, probably. Maybe just… pre-made ring bands. It wouldn’t count for much, she thinks, if she just got him something that was half done anyway. Not that he wore jewellery very often.

It’s a stupid idea, she insists to herself again.

She gets back to her apartment with a tiny block of sylvanwood and a new carving tool.

No, it’s not even a pre-made ring band, but she doesn’t know his size. That’s her excuse and she’s sticking to it. And so what if she actually makes the whole thing herself? He doesn’t need to know that.

It smells like Solas’ shop exploded in her kitchen, anyway. Cole is somehow covered in flour despite most of the surfaces remaining spotless. The biscuits are cooling and the tarts are in the oven, and she goes and digs her recipe for sweet potato cheesecake with pecan crust out of a box under her bed, and takes out a practically ancient shortbread cookie recipe, too, for good measure.

By the time she sends Cole off with two salad wraps and a kiss on the cheek as thanks for letting her kidnap him, she’s somehow covered in flour, too. She sets the cheesecake on a cooling rack, and cleans up before she turns back to the sylvanwood. 

She glances at the clock.

Two pm.

Plenty of time.

She’s rusty at caving, but this should be simple enough. It’s probably like riding a bicycle, right?

Thirty minutes later she’s covered in wood shavings and there are three nicks on her fingers, and she’s swearing in elvish, and the one usable ring shape she’s gotten so far might be too small for Solas’ fingers. She squints at it, and thins out the interior a little more.

Her phone jangles.

She frowns and puts down her carving, checks it and sees Solas’ number.

“Hey,” she greets.

“Cassandra says you are ill?” he replies, without any preamble.

…Dammit.

If there is one thing guaranteed to be less successful than lying to Cassandra, it’s Cassandra’s own actual attempts to lie. 

Why? Why hadn’t Leliana intervened? She looks at the clock again. Right. Almost three, probably Leliana had been taking a break and Solas had just stepped in to see if she would be interested in going to lunch - like he almost always did if it wasn’t crowded - and then Cassandra had been left to try and explain where she was without ruining the birthday surprise.

“I’m not sick, I was lying to get out of work,” she declares.

There’s an awkward pause.

“That does not seem like you,” he tells her, and he sounds  _worried._

Dammit.

Dammit, dammit, dammit.

“It’s true, I’m fine,” she insists. “I’m just doing a lot of things, that’s all.”

“Anything I can help with?”

He still sounds worried, and she curses internally and looks at her lumpy, unfinished ring. She’ll need to carve the decorations and finish it and… yeah, there’s no way she’s going to be able to get that done. Not without chasing him away until dinner, at least, and if she does that he’s going to spend his birthday thinking she’s keeping things from him or something, because she can already tell she’s not going to be able to bullshit her way out of this one.

“Sure. Come over to my place,” she says.

“What are you working on?” he wonders.

“You’ll see.”

As soon she hangs up, she bolts to her feet. She gets the wood shavings into the garbage and shoves her project rather regretfully into the closet, and finishes decorating the cake, and manages to get most of the wood dust and flour off of herself. She briefly considers wearing something vaguely sexy, but indecision on which of her wardrobe pieces might qualify as such costs her valuable time, so in the end she just yanks on her tightest jeans and her cleanest sweater.

She hears his keys in the lock, and a sudden wave of uncertainty sweeps over her.

It’s not like she’s managed to throw together a party or anything. There’s just some food and - and she didn’t finish his gift, and  _why_  couldn’t she think of a way to stall him…?

He opens the door and blinks at her.

He’s wearing his stupid hideous scarf and a coat that looks like it patched itself together out of the remnants that other coats left behind in a lint trap somewhere, and his lips are very pink and there’s a concerned line between his brows, and it’s ridiculous how her heart jumps  _every time_  she sees him.

Isn’t it tired by now?

With a deep internal sigh, she just gives up on herself, and gestures towards the elegant arrangement of desserts littering her tiny table.

“Happy birthday,” she says.

He goes stock still.

His eyes dart between the table, and her, and back to the table again. And then back to her once more. 

He blinks.

“How - how did you know?” he wonders.

“That would be betraying my sources,” she replies. She’ll give Cole full credit for his contributions once she’s sure that this wasn’t actually a disastrous idea.

Slowly, Solas closes the door behind him.

“It’s not much. It’s just food, basically,” she admits. “Not even a lot of food. Just desserts and things.”

“I don’t usually celebrate at all,” he replies.

She shrugs.

“Well I mean - I mean, I didn’t do it to make you uncomfortable.” A whole new wave of self-doubt crashes over her. “I’m sorry. I guess I should have just asked. I kind of wanted to surprise you, though. But that might not have been the best idea. It was mostly just an excuse to do something nice for you. Because I like it when I can do nice things for you. Sometimes. That’s all. It doesn’t even really have to be a birthday thing, it could be just be some food at my apartment. Which we were going to do anyway. Eat things. Here.”

Oh no.

Oh no she’s  _babbling._ She’s babbling like Dagna used to do any time Sera actually spoke to her for those first two weeks after they met. Except they’re way more than two weeks into this relationship, and she’s pretty sure inexplicable nerves look a lot better on adorable dwarven college students than they do on her, and this is probably just tremendously stupid of her, on all levels, and  _why?_

Solas is just sort of standing there. Mesmerized.

She swallows.

“Is this alright?” she asks him.

He blinks, and she realizes his eyes are uncommonly bright. His throat bobs as he swallows.

He clears his throat.

“This is… very lovely. Thank you,” he says, and before she can fully appreciate that she’s somehow managed to make him teary-eyed, he sweeps in and gathers her into his arms.

He smells like the fresh air from outside and dryer sheets. Laundry day. He probably spent the morning of his birthday doing laundry instead of having her hand feed him grapes or something, and that’s just sad. 

She wraps her arms around him in return, and lets out a relieved breath.

“It’s not a big deal,” she assures him again.

He squeezes her tightly for a few seconds. Then he pulls back and starts peppering her face with kisses. Her cheeks, her nose, her lips, even the corner of her eyebrow, until she laughs and kisses him properly. She curls her hands into his hideous jacket and he melts into her, and when she starts to pull back he catches her again, instead, and dips her down until she nearly loses her balance.

With an undignified snort of amusement - that frankly doesn’t translate too well into impassioned kissing - she clutches at his shoulders, and regains her footing.

“Happy birthday, then,” she decides.

He kisses her nose.

“This is perfect,” he tells her.

“You haven’t even tried anything yet,” she points out.

“Perfect,” he insists, shaking his head at her. A bolt of warmth shoots straight through her, a heady mingling of affection and desire.

They get in a few more kisses before she finally manages to him settled on the couch. She hauls Cole’s offerings and the shortbreads over for them to picnic with while Solas rifles through her Netflix account, looking for something that won’t offend his exacting standards. 

She’s a little surprised when he plucks up one of the shortbreads first.

“What’s this?” he asks, as she goes to get something to drink. What to choose? Well, she’s got a bottle of wine. It’s a special occasion. Why not?

“A cookie,” she tells him.

He turns and looks at her over the back of the couch, raising his eyebrows, and she snorts and sweeps a kiss across his temple.

“It’s just a shortbread,” she says.

He bites into it, and makes a sound usually reserved for when she’s got her hand down his pants.

“It melted.  _Perfectly,”_  he tells her.

She shrugs, and grabs one off of the plate.

“They’re supposed to melt in your mouth,” she tells him. “Delicious buttery goodness.” The candied cherries on top are a bit sweet. Usually she’s very judicious with them, but in light of his sensibilities, she’d been a bit more liberal.

He looks at her, and shakes his head. Opens his mouth, then seems to decide not to say whatever he had been about to say, and picks up another cookie instead.

Wise of him, probably.

She pours them each a glass of wine, and he settles on watching something with a lot of colourful dialogue and explosions. She leans against him, and discovers that the strawberry tarts are ridiculous and disgusting, the profiteroles are fluffy and decent, and the honey-hazelnut cookies are actually pretty good. At some point into her second glass of wine she notices that Solas is looking a little bored with the movie.

She slides down against him, casual and easy, and unzips his fly.

When she gets her hand into his pants, she has to amend her earlier assessment - the sound is  _slightly_  more ragged this way, she decides, and then she works him out and drops her head to his lap. Spreads herself out onto the couch, and gets her lips around him.

He’s warm and she can still taste the wine in her mouth. She’s unhurried as she strokes and sucks at him, working him up until she has to hold his hips to keep him from jerking reflexively. He fists one hand in the back of her sweater.

“Vhenan,” he says, when he’s close; a warning, and an endearment, and she feels a rush of warmth as he comes in her mouth.

She licks her lips, and smiles up at his flushed face.

“Happy birthday,” she tells him.

“When is yours?” he wonders, somewhat dazedly.

“Not for a while,” she admits.

“Damn,” he says, and she laughs, and sits up again.

“If you were hoping to pay me back, we don’t have to wait that long,” she tells him. She waggles her eyebrows at him. “I’ve got some extra cherries and some whipped cream in the fridge.”

While that’s technically true, she’s mostly joking, until she sees the spark suddenly come into his eyes. A flare of brilliant interest that sends another bolt of heat through her.

She stills, and he reaches over and runs a hand across her jaw. Then he leans in and kisses her.

“Now there is an idea,” he murmurs, when he pulls back.

She smiles at him.

“If you want to,” she agrees. 

Could be fun.

At the obvious  _yes_   _I want to very much_ in his expression, she clambers over the back of the couch, and goes and retrieves the items in question. The whipped cream is hand whipped, so she gives the bowl another mix before she scoops up the leftover cherries.

By silent, mutual agreement they make their way into the bedroom. She settles the ingredients onto the nightstand, and Solas slips up behind her and slides his warm hands up her sweater, then helps pull it off of her. 

The sensuality of the moment is somewhat diminished when she nearly topples over trying to peel her jeans off of her legs, but it only makes them both laugh before he nudges her onto the bed and finishes the job for her.

She returns the favour by yanking his shirt off, and then she almost forgets about the food altogether as they finish getting one another out of their layers, until he leans back and grabs the bowl of whipped cream up.

He drops the tiniest spoon full onto her collarbones. It makes her jump at the cold; and then again when the warmth of his mouth presses over it to lick it away. She reaches a finger into the bowl and presses some to the bridge of his nose, and kisses it off in return.

He drops some onto her stomach next, and she jerks at the cold again, and laughs when his touch brushes her sides too gently, and his tongue tickles across the sensitive skin. He smiles against her, and fetches the cherries.

When he comes back, she pulls him into another kiss. His mouth is so excellent, really. It’s amazing what he can do with it. Amazing enough that she can forgive it for making him so weird about food. Even his stupid tongue.

_Especially_  his stupid tongue.

Which he then puts to exceptional use after liberally topping her breasts with whipped cream and cherries, like some kind of ridiculous dessert. He looks very pleased with himself afterwards, too.

Whipped cream and cherries. So silly.

She finds she really, profoundly doesn’t care about that when he eats a cherry out of her navel, though, and dips his tongue into it. Spreads more whipped cream over her abdomen, and sends her into uncontrollable giggling fits as he curls his thumbs gently over her hips, and licks her clean. He looks unreasonably delighted every time he makes her laugh.

Then he coaxes her legs over his shoulders, and kisses the inside of her thigh.

He stares up at her. Her breath hitches at the warmth in his eyes, and then escapes her in a rush when he sets his mouth to the main event. He presses in close, dragging his tongue in heavy strokes, whirling it over her clit and sucking at her, uncommonly fierce and hungry until he drags her to completion.

Then he climbs up and kisses her again.

“Ma vhenan,” he sighs against her lips.

She swallows.

Well.

She used it first, she supposes.

She cups her hands around his face, and rests their foreheads together.

He’s - unsurprisingly - hard again, she realizes. Once she’s caught her breath, she nudges him over and takes a turn, then, spreading the last of the whipped cream over his chest and licking it off. Trying to make him laugh, and only succeeding when she finally curls her fingers gently behind his knees.

He twists one hand into the sheets as his laugh breaks out of him. It shakes through her, warm and happy, and she very much gets the appeal.

Her mouth’s too tired for much more activity at that point, though, so she finishes him with her hand instead; curling her fingers around him and drinking in every ragged breath that escapes his lips. Her gaze fixes onto the line of his throat as he arches into her touch. The curve of his jaw, and the sound he makes when he comes.

She loves him so much.

She… really does.

With an internal sigh at herself, she kisses him again, and then goes to get some wet wipes. They’re both covered in spit and bits of whipped cream and come, but they don’t exactly do the most mature and responsible job of cleaning one another up, either.

Detours are made.

More saliva is added to the mix, at certain points.

“You haven’t asked how old I am yet,” Solas notes. It’s the most he’s said about the specific occasion since he arrived.

She shrugs.

“I’m not really fussy about the numbers,” she admits. “I just figured it was a good way to get you into bed.”

He huffs, somehow not the least bit convinced of her devious motives.

“Birthdays were often an occasion for family gatherings. I learned to detest them,” he admits. “I had forgotten that they are meant to be pleasant things.”

He’s never said much about his family, she realizes. Of course, most Dalish don’t  _have_  to say much about their family - everyone usually already knows everyone else’s business - and Kirkwall’s neighbourhoods are generally tight-knit enough that it’s not much different. So she doesn’t think she’s ever really had to make a lot of inquiries about someone’s family before. She realizes that some part of her had almost assumed that he didn’t  _have_  one - that he was as solitary as most of the other drifters who eventually seemed to collect in her circle tended to be.

She’s not going to ask him for more information on that today, though, she decides. It’s obviously a sensitive subject.

“Want some cake?” she offers, instead.

“Did you make the cake?” he asks, intrigued.

“Yes I made the cake,” she tells him. “It’ll be good, I promise.”

Wow, she really hopes he likes this damn cake.

He smiles at her, and she thinks she’ll probably never be able to actually know for certain, because that smile says that she could serve him mud on a shovel right now and he’d choke it down and pretend it was delicious.

Still. When she finally gets him sitting down with a slice in front of him, he actually does seem to enjoy it. She tells him a little bit about the recipe, and then about the shortbread recipe, because apparently those cookies are the real stars of the evening.

And it’s possible that the next morning she makes him a bubblegum milkshake.

Because she is a sap.

She forgets about the sylvanwood scraps in the bottom of her closet until she gets back from work the day after that, and then in the end it takes her about three days of fiddling around with the project to get it right. Upon consideration she keeps it simple, and just adds a few whirling patterns to the basic band. Finishes it, and then keeps it in her pocket for another three days as she debates whether or not to actually give it to him.

His birthday’s long over.

But she still meant to give him an actual  _item_. That’s what the city elves do, what the humans do, what most everyone in Kirkwall does on birthdays. Hell, on her last birthday she got more stuff than she could carry home with her on a single trip. She had to leave half of it with Varric in the Hanged Man and go back for it the next day.

But this kind of gift…

But he’s not even Dalish. He probably wouldn’t even be aware of the level of devotion she was implying with it.

She’s turning it over in her fingers, thinking about it carefully, when he shows up at the shop to see if she wants to go to lunch. Leliana’s working with her today, and Cassandra will later pretend not to be terribly angry over having missed what follows.

But she takes it as a sign that she’s holding it when she sees him.

She makes up her mind when he smiles at her, and asks for her company again. Like he always asks for it; like he’s always  _eager_  for it.

“You remember your birthday?” she says, as she slips out from behind the counter.

“Of course,” he replies, with a little smile.

She nods, and then takes his hand and presses the ring into it.

“I, um. I wanted to give you something, but it was kind of last minute, so it wasn’t ready in time,” she explains.

Solas lifts the ring to look at it. 

His expression shifts from curiosity to shock.

“Did you make this?” he asks her softly, and all at once she knows that he knows.

_He knows._

Oh shit.

“You’re hard to shop for,” she tells him, as she considers her odds of successfully playing this off as Not a Big Deal.

…Even if it possibly actually is.

Maybe.

A little.

He lowers the ring from the light. Glances at her, inscrutably, and then slips it onto his left ring finger. 

It fits. 

Her breath catches. In her defence it actually looks pretty nice on him, and there was a good chance she’d guessed his size wrong, or screwed up the sizing while she was making it anyway. So it’s just a relief that it fits and isn’t ridiculous. Especially because his fingers are basically works of art unto themselves.

Obviously.

“Ar lath ma,” he tells her.

Her heart skips a beat.

He steps in close, searching her face, and brushes her cheek with the hand wearing his new ring.

“I really, truly do love you,” he says.

For some reason her voice decides that this is a really good time to stop working. But apparently she’s given herself away pretty thoroughly enough already, because he just smiles and makes it even harder for her to say anything by kissing her until she forgets how to breathe.

When they finally part, she looks over his shoulder to see that Leliana is smiling indulgently at them. With a certain gleam in her eye that also says that more bets have been won and lost this day.

Dammit.

Fine, then.

She grabs Solas by his jacket, and reels him in for another kiss.

“I love you too,” she admits.

His expression goes beautifully warm. Impossibly fond. He brushes his thumb across her cheek, and sighs across her lips.

“So I gathered,” he says, as if it’s all amazingly wondrous.

She supposes that’s fair, in the end.

It really kind of is.


	8. Light Reading

Varric ends up giving her a copy of the book himself.

Signed.

She looks at the cover, upon which a very well-endowed and vaguely familiar-looking elven woman is swooning into the arms of some bald underwear model covered in fur pelts.

“Please tell me this is not what I think it is,” she asks, flatly. The Hanged Man is a bustle of activity around them. Televisions blaring, drinks clinking. There’s a party over by the bar. Some kind of Fereldan sporting event, it looks like. Cullen is ensconced with some of the Hawkes and Amells, cheering about dogs and cursing out the competing team – Antiva, she thinks, if the way Josephine is shouting him down is any indication.

Ordinarily she’d join in, if only for the excuse to shout at things, but Varric has managed to capture her complete attention.

In a very crowded public place.

Full of witnesses.

Yes, there’s definitely a reason why he spends all of his time here, she muses, as she slowly flips the book over and looks at the back cover.

“Some of the characters are  _loosely inspired_  by people I know. Like always,” Varric tells her, waving a hand dismissively. “It’s not a big deal. I just didn’t want you hearing about it and getting the wrong idea.”

She raises an eyebrow at him as she reads the summary.

“Raised in the wilds of the Ancient Dales, Lethvallem – seriously, Varric? You couldn’t have asked Merrill for a name?”

“What’s wrong with that name?” he asks, honestly bewildered. All his editors and the man is even friends with actual Dalish, and still shit like this happens.

She just sighs.

“ _Lethvallem_  has only ever known the simplicity of the clan and living off of the land. But when her people need a representative for a conclave of world issues, no one else can rise to the challenge in time. What trials await her range far beyond the politics of ancient courts and kings, however, as Lethvallem soon finds herself embroiled in the intrigues of a mysterious apostate with unknown ties to the gods. Even the most dreaded god of all. There’s an old Dalish saying - ‘may the Dread Wolf never catch your scent’. But for Lethvallem, it is already too late.”

She stares.

Varric looks, of all things, marginally hopeful.

“See? Completely different,” he says.

“You realize this is actually blasphemy, right?” she wonders.

He waves dismissively.

“That’s what Cassandra said when I wrote that story about Andraste and Archon Hessarian, and she still read it.”

Point. Varric is, if nothing, pretty even-handed in his willingness to fictionalize anything and everything. She sighs and glances at the ridiculous cover again. There’s a blurb from some Orlesian author praising it as a ‘steamy page-turner’.

“Is there porn in this? Did you write porn about me and my boyfriend, Varric?” she asks, narrowing her eyes at him.

“It’s not you. It’s based  _off of_  you. And anyway, there’s only one vaguely erotic scene. You should know better than to trust the blurbs,” he insists.

There’s a cry from up by the bar. She can hear Josephine snapping at Cullen, unusually vicious, and joined by another naggingly familiar voice. One of Isabela’s friends, she thinks. Another Antivan, definitely. One who’s not afraid to question people’s parentage in the midst of a sporting match, it seems.

“I’ve read your ‘erotica’, Varric. If you described any part of my body using food euphemisms, I will end you,” she warns him.

He swallows.

“Listen, I think we would all be much more comfortable if you just skimmed those parts. My editor made a lot of changes. Frankly I’m not even completely sure what’s in there,” he says. “You know what? It’s probably not even any good. You shouldn’t worry about it. Here, give it back to me, and I’ll replace it with a copy of the next  _Swords & Shields_. You can give it to Cassandra the next time you piss her off. Works like a charm.”

He reaches for the book.

She lifts it up over her head.

There are some advantages to having dwarven friends. Being in a rare positon height-wise is one of them.

“Too late now,” she tells him.

Over at the bar she hears the distinctive tones of one of the Hawke/Amell brood shouting something about how even if they  _were_  sired by a mabari that would just be an  _advantage._

Varric sighs.

“I knew this was a bad idea. I should have just let it quietly make it onto the bookshelves and trusted you to be too distracted by Chuckles’ celestially forged earlobes to notice,” he says.

“Ha ha,” she replies.

But in all honesty, she’s not that bothered about it. Varric really  _does_  base his characters off of everybody. Friends and friends of friends. Acquaintances. Television personalities. A few celebrities. Random news articles. It’s just the way he’s always been, and everyone is more or less used to it. Ribbing him about it at this point is basically a tradition more than a matter of genuine outrage.

It’s probably a step up from her last cameo as an elven pirate on Definitely-Not-Isabela’s crew, at least.

The books have a formula where characters display some general similarities but are otherwise completely unrecognizable. It’s even fun, sometimes. Most infamously, Vivienne was very pleased with her recurring appearances as a villain in one of the shorter serials. And Anders really enjoyed that book where his character blew up a chantry.

She opts to let Varric live another day, in the end, and spends most of the rest of the evening joining in the shouting at the… competitive water polo, it looks like. Huh.

She sides with the Antivans. Mostly because they’re outnumbered, but also because as soon as she gets close, Josephine grabs her and informs that she’s rooting for the Crows, now, with the kind of scary intensity usually reserved for high-stakes criminal heists or catering events.

By the time the match is over, Antiva has won and it’s just on the cusp of midnight. With very little alcohol in her system – especially as compared to the others at the bar – she ends up retrieving Josephine’s keys from the bartender and serving as impromptu designated driver for her friend and a few friends-of-friends. It’s past one in the morning by the time she’s done, and Josephine’s building is within walking distance of Solas’, so she ends up just heading there instead.

He’s made it pretty clear he’d prefer she came to his place rather than not in these kinds of situations, and that she’s welcome to simply turn up. So she doesn’t bother calling. Just slips in as quietly as she can.

The apartment’s dark, with the only light being what’s spilling in through the windows.

Last time she did this she decided not to wake him, and crawled onto the couch instead. She woke up to him staring down at her at three in the morning, utterly bewildered and barely awake, asking why she wasn’t in his bed. As if that was a far more pressing concern than why she was in his apartment at all.

This time she just leaves her things by the entryway, and goes into the bedroom.

Solas is a massive lump beneath the covers, buried under more blankets than she could possibly count in the dark.

She locates the top of his head and brushes her hand over it.

“Hey,” she says, softly.

He shifts and rolls over, burrows deeper into the blankets for a moment, and then pops back out again and blinks at her.

“Your hands are cold,” he muzzily informs her.

She grins.

“Sorry,” she says.

In the dark, she can only just see him frown. Then he spreads some of his blanket hoard out, and smacks the pillow next to him. She guesses that’s about as coherent as things are getting, but it’s good enough that he won’t wake up wondering who the hell is in bed with him. She strips down and climbs in on the other side, and only realizes how cold she actually is when she finds herself wrapped up in welcome, cozy warmth.

_Bliss,_  she thinks, and drifts off to sleep pretty quickly.

When she wakes up, it’s to a sea of fuzzy green and grey sheets, and Solas kissing her nose.

“Do you want a ride in to work?” he asks her, as she twitches it and blinks at him.

“I want to sleep for a week,” she mutters, but then she sighs and throws the blankets back anyway.

Getting ready for work after a night at Solas’ place is always a little hectic. His bathroom mirror is very small, and sometimes he misses a tiny spot of toothpaste at the corner of his mouth when he finishes cleaning his teeth, and she usually ends up brushing it off of him, which means she touches his mouth. Which generally means he kisses her fingers, and then, of course, she has to kiss his lips, which tends to distract them both.

A little.

It’s possible they’re easily distracted.

She ends up forgetting about Varric’s book in her haste to get out of the door in time to open the shop. Then she gets in a big order for a massive weekend brunch, and she stays late going over logistics with Cassandra, and it’s a last minute order but they can make it if she works late tomorrow, so she’s got that all cluttering up her head when she finally goes back to her own apartment.

The next day’s hectic as they come, and so is the next evening, but in the morning the bagels are cooked to perfection and the delivery goes off without a hitch.

She’s in a pretty good mood, so she texts Solas to let him know she’s coming and that dinner’s on her, and splurges on some take-away from the Tevine restaurant up the street. The bag’s still hot when she gets in the door. She’s humming a little under her breath, and Solas is sitting on his couch, reading something.

“Hey. They’d made some of those candied ginger treats fresh when I got there, so I grabbed you an extra bag. Hope you’re hungry,” she tells him, as she slides the food onto the counter.

He doesn’t reply.

Blinking, she glances over at him, and notices a few odd things.

For one, he’s sitting right up on the edge of the couch. Normally when he reads, if he’s not at a table, he tends to lean back. Spread out a little. His gaze is fixed to the last page of what looks like a small paperback. Also unusual; he tends to prefer hardcover, whenever possible.

Before she can say anything, he apparently reaches the end of the story. Well, she guesses, that explains why he’s so caught up in it. But as she watches, he flips the last page over, and then back again, as if looking for more. He tilts the cover, and she finally recognizes what he’s reading.

It’s Varric’s latest ridiculous literary exploit.

Carefully, she pads over to him, as he glares at the last page. She taps him on the shoulder.

He jumps.

“Hey,” she says again. Then she nods at the book. “Gripping read?”

The light-hearted tone she was aiming for falls a bit short when his frown stays firmly in place.

For a bit.

Then he searches her eyes, and his expression falters into something pained enough to make her breath hitch.

“Does Varric hate me?” he wonders.

She blinks.

“What? No! Why would…?” she glances down at the book again, and then sighs and takes it out of his hands. Right. Of course. Varric modeled Solas’ character after one of the most maligned figures in the Dalish faith.

“Were you the villain?” she asks, gently.

His frown deepens.

“It’s okay,” she assures him. “He made Vivienne a villain, too. And Alistair was an alcoholic. And one time Cullen was a serial killer. It’s got nothing to do with how he thinks of you. In fact it’s practically a rite of passage at this point. You know the Kirkwall community has accepted you when Varric writes you into a novel as some terrible knock-off version of yourself.”

Solas lets out a breath, but he doesn’t seem to have cheered up very much. She nudges him off the couch and tries to ply him with spicy food and conversation, but it’s pretty clear it’s not working. He eats, and talks, but he’s distracted, and every so often he glares at Varric’s book like it’s committed some heinous personal attack on him.

Finally, she gives up.

“What happened?” she asks.

“I cannot figure it out,” he finally admits. “There is no mention of a possible sequel or continuation anywhere on that book. By all appearances it is meant to be a stand-alone novel. But there is no _resolution.”_

She stares at him.

He’s mad… because he wants more?

Shit.

Oh fucking hell.

If Solas turns into Cassandra over this, the universe really does hate her.

“Vhenan, don’t take this the wrong way, but… I didn’t think you’d be that big of a fan,” she ventures.

He waves a hand irately through the air.

“It is not that!” he insists. “Varric’s novels can be entertaining, but they are not typically gripping.  But this one – he leaves! He leaves her. He ruined the entirety of her life, swept through like some terrible hurricane, and then  _left her maimed and alone!_  With allusions to some dire plot on his behalf and some intention on her part to rescue him from it. That is unacceptable!”

He makes a sharp, cutting motion through the air with his hand.

His jaw is clenched.

His eyes are suspiciously bright.

Holy shit, it  _is_  Cassandra all over again.

Fuck you, fate.

She looks at him, all bright-eyed and clearly hurt and upset, no matter how hard he’s trying to hide it. Then she sighs and picks up the book.

“Bad book,” she scolds, and smacks it against the counter.

Solas startles a little.

Marching over to the freezer, she yanks it open, and exchanges the book for a small container of vanilla ice cream. Leaving the literary offence to suffer in Freezer Jail, she gets a spoon from the nearby drawer, and then herds Solas back towards the couch.

“Vhenan, what are-”

“Shush,” she tells him.

Once she’s got him planted firmly on the couch, with his ice-cream and spoon and a slightly befuddled look on his face, she goes into the bedroom and gathers up two of the comfiest blankets, and a few pillows. Then she heads back in and wordlessly begins settling them around Solas – who raises his eyebrows, but obligingly lifts his ice-cream when she shoves a pillow into his lap, and sweeps the blankets around him. Once he is suitably cozied, she snuggles in at his side.

“Alright,” she declares. “Tell me about this horrible tragedy that Varric has somehow offended you with.”

Solas looks at his ice-cream, and the blankets, and then at her.

He lets out an amused huff; which is, she decides, vastly preferable to all the glaring and frowning of before.

“I suppose it is somewhat… silly of me,” he says.

She waits.

“It is just that – that was no  _ending!”_  Solas eventually insists. “The entire story set up this mystery of what was going on and who was behind it all, and the truth was revealed, but nothing was  _resolved._ ”

“So, maybe there  _is_  going to be a sequel,” she reasons.

His brow furrows, and he scrapes the top of the ice cream with his spoon.

“Perhaps. But even if there is, I fail to see how things could ever reach a satisfactory conclusion,” he grumbles. “The man broke her heart. Twice! First he was going to tell her in the glen, but then he panicked and backed out of that. Then he finally told her he was Fen’Harel at the end, and she – she loved him anyway! He told her he was  _the Dread Wolf_ , and she still…” he trails off, and then shoves a spoonful of ice cream into his mouth. “But he just left her. He took her arm and left her.”

She tilts her head.

“Literally? Why did he take her arm?” she wonders.

Solas gestures vaguely with his spoon.

“She had a magical item in her hand. It was going to kill her. He took it out, but the limb was too damaged to be salvaged,” he explains.

“Well that’s not really taking her arm, then. That’s more like a life-saving amputation,” she reasons.

“It was  _his fault_  she had the magic in her in the first place!” Solas snaps.

He’s off then, explaining the plot as she nods at the appropriate places, and makes aghast sounds, and offers soothing pats. It’s kind of funny, really, except that he’s genuinely worked up about it for some unfathomable reason. She doesn’t think she’s ever seen a piece of fiction sweep him so thoroughly away before.

It occurs to her, once he’s scraping the bottom of his ice cream container, that maybe the problem here is that Varric’s character was a little  _too_  close to the mark this time. Not that she thinks Solas is liable to abandon her in a glen or try to tear apart the world any time soon, but Fen’Harel’s reasoning and preferences are, in general, very… Solas-y.

When he trails off on his description of the scene where Fen’Harel kills Mythal and steals her magic powers for his world-ending plans, she leans over and pats his blanket-covered arm.

“It’s okay,” she tells him.

He scowls at his spoon.

Then he glances at her, and some of his expression shifts into something a bit more… mournful.

“Most of my family are named after the elven gods,” he admits. “It was something of a thematic trend. Worthy traits or mythology. Those were the two categories.”

Oh.

Well.

…Damn.

“Varric doesn’t know that,” she tells him.

He sighs.

“I am aware. It is only that…” he swallows, and drops his spoon into the empty container. Moves the remnants onto the coffee table, and then sits on the edge of the couch, lost in unhappy thought again until she tugs him back.

“You don’t happen to have any plans to destroy the world, do you?” she wonders.

He snorts.

“No,” he says.

“Any sudden desires to go running around in fancy armour and wolf pelts?” she checks.

A huff escapes the sad blanket mountain.

“No.”

She leans a little closer, getting her arms more fully around him.

“And you aren’t thinking about breaking up with me any time soon, are you?” she asks.

His breath hitches.

The immediate denial doesn’t come, this time.

A trill of uncertainty runs through her. It had seemed, all things considered, a pretty far-fetched idea when she’d asked him. But all at once, she finds herself wondering if it’s really so preposterous after all. Maybe it’s not just family names and Varric being a little too good at his characterization. Maybe he’s upset because he’s… because he’s been thinking about leaving her, and this book just painted that whole prospect as something villainous.

Things have being great. Things have been really, really good in fact.

Better than good.

But maybe that’s just been on her end…?

She starts to pull back, and gets maybe an inch away from the blankets before they’re swept sideways, all of a sudden, and he drags her into his lap. She lets out a brief ‘oof’ of surprise as she lands on the pillow, and then nearly gets smothered in a cozy green comforter, before she blinks and sees that he’s looking at her with startling intensity.

“No,” he says.

Her own breath goes absolutely still.

“I have no intention of breaking up with you, not even remotely,” he tells her.

Air?

What is air?

How does breathing work, again? That’s supposed to be a thing, right? Somehow she’s forgotten it, though. Somehow she’s forgotten everything except for the look of him, just then. Swallowed in blankets and upset over Varric’s stupid book, holding her intently, his sweater askew and his cheeks flushed and his eyes narrowed.

When she finally finds her voice, it’s like a dam has burst, and common sense goes flying completely into the wind.

“Marry me,” she tells him.

He freezes.

Shit.

Shit, shit, shit.

Shit.

_Shit._

Traitorous stupid mouth and cowardly, worthless brain, and apparently all bets are off and so are all of her filters, and she could probably play it off as a joke except now her throat’s closed and her mind’s a blank again and he looks utterly thrown.

So is she, for that matter. What even was that? What?  _Marry me?_  Why did she – how did – they haven’t even  _talked about - !_

His thumb brushes over her cheek.

“Alright,” he whispers.

…

…What.

He looks at her, and then clears his throat a little.

“Yes. Absolutely, I will,” he declares, a little more firmly.

She searches his face, looking for… what, she’s not sure. Doubt, maybe. A sudden loss of his better judgement. Possibly even signs of possession. But all she can find is warmth, and resolution, and _want._  An affectionate, aching want that hits something deep in her.

She leans up and kisses him.

His lips are soft and his mouth tastes like vanilla. She gets a hand on his collar and clutches at the fabric, and he gets his arms around her and bends in, and it’s admittedly a kind of awkward angle. But she can’t bring herself to stop kissing him for long enough to move.

When she finally does drop back down, he smiles at her.

“Did I just propose?” she asks him.

His lips twitch.

“You did,” he confirms.

She swallows.

“And you accepted?”

“I did.”

Okay.

Yeah.

She’s… yeah.

Solas’ expression droops a little, starting to look concerned. She reaches up and caresses his face. His stupidly beautiful face, that comes with his stupidly beautiful body, and his ridiculously brilliant mind, and his patently absurd personality. And his exceptionally awful taste in baked goods. His utter inability to pick out clothes. His unfairly hypnotic voice. His dumb… his… him.

Just him.

“Good,” she tells him. “Yes. Marry me.”

She nearly falls off the couch when he swoops down to kiss her again.


	9. Light Reading, Follow-Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Okay but ya know... Lavellan is probably gonna bug Varric for a sequel. One where Fen'Harel is redeemed and the world is saved and they get a happy ending. And he's gonna wanna know why. And she's bad at lying, so she's accidentally gonna tell him, awkwardly, that in trying to comfort Solas, she kinda sorta proposed, and dammit Varric that's not the point, he needs closure and... well, yeah, he accepted. Look are you doing a sequel or not?

“You want me to compromise my artistic integrity?” Varric asks, unconvincingly aghast.

She narrows her eyes.

“You will write a sequel, and you will end it  _happily ever after,”_  she repeats. Firmly.

He sighs.

“To be honest, I’m surprised you care that much,” Varric admits. “I guess my writing’s better than I thought if it got  _you_  all worked up. You didn’t even cry at the opening of that movie about the old mage and his flying house.”

Carefully, she schools her expression into utter blankness.

“Yes. Me. I got worked up,” she agrees.

Varric points at her.

“Ha! I knew it. It was Chuckles, wasn’t it? What did he say? Did he cry? Tear up a little?”

She frowns.

“Well he kind of wanted to know why you apparently  _hate him,”_  she snaps.

He blinks, and some of his enthusiasm dims.

“What? I don’t hate him! I made him into one of the most complex antagonists I’ve ever managed to write,” he objects.

“You had him wreck the world and break up with me!” Her temper flares as she remembers the look of hurt on Solas’ face. “He was so damn distraught over the whole idea I ended up proposing!”

Varric blinks.

She freezes.

There’s a long, awkward pause.

“…Uh… Congratulations?”

She folds her arms.

“Happily ever after, Varric,” she insists.

He sighs.

“I guess I better. You might end up having his kid if I don’t.”


	10. Sick Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sick fic!

She wakes up in the morning with fog in her head, sandpaper in her throat, and a nose she can’t breathe through.

Shit.

A glance at her clock reveals that she’s slept through her alarm. It’s fifteen minutes until opening time. She huffs out a curse and reaches for her phone, and is surprised to find there are no missed messages. Until she abruptly remembers that it’s actually her day off, and heaves a sigh of relief.

No work; no rush. She can sleep in, which is good, because even just reaching for the phone has left her a little dizzy, and she’s in no hurry to try and peel herself out of her blankets. Even though she kind of has to use the bathroom. It doesn’t seem like it’s worth moving for, though. She puts it off until the discomfort in her throat and the press on her bladder are more than she can ignore, and the she gives in and makes the effort.

The room spins.

Her skin feels hot. But, she  _was_  just in bed. Probably the blanket cocoon is to blame for that.

Yes.

Definitely not a fever, no.

This is likely just one of those morning colds that strikes the unwary sometimes. A little medicine, a glass of juice, some rest, and by the afternoon she’ll be completely fine.

She uses the washroom. Retrieves some cold and sinus meds from her bathroom cabinet, and opts for a glass of water from the tap to wash them down. Staggering the extra steps to the kitchen just doesn’t seem worth it. She climbs back into bed, and snuggles into the blankets once more, intent on napping just until the pills kick in.

She wakes up to the sound of her phone jangling at her.

It takes her a minute to figure out where she dropped it in her bed.

“Hello?” she answers, blearily.

Damn. That’s not a healthy sounding voice. That voice crawled its ass out of a crypt somewhere.

She vaguely registers Dorian making aghast noises on the other end of the line.

“Are you  _sick?_ ” he demands, as if this is some kind of insult.

“…Maybe,” she concedes, blinking and staring at her clock until the numbers look like numbers, and not just angry, blurry lines. 

Just past noon. No wonder Dorian’s calling, they were supposed to meet for lunch at eleven thirty. She must have stood him up.

“I’m so sorry, Dorian,” she says. “I missed lunch.”

Or, well. This is what she means to say. What actually comes out is more like ‘I’m do borry, Borian’ but maybe she’s mishearing herself. She’s pretty sure her ears are plugged, too.

“Yes, well, losing out on the chance to spend time with me is always something to lament, but let’s put it aside for now. Just how sick are you?” Dorian asks her.

“Only a little,” she insists. “I took medicine. I just fell asleep.”

“Mmhmm. And you’re alone, aren’t you? I’ll be there in… or,  _actually_ , I think there’s someone else I should call now, isn’t there?” he muses.

“Wha?” she asks. Her brain is having troubles keeping up with his pace, under the circumstances.

Come on, Dorian.

Talk slower.

“Are you going to bring me soup?” she wonders. That’s nice, when he does that. Although maybe he won’t, because she stood him up and that sucks. She shouldn’t have done that. Dorian’s a good friend. All of her friends are good friends. How did she ever meet so many nice humans? It’s like the lion’s share of them all just set up shop in Kirkwall, to try and counter the over-abundant assholes already in residence.

“Oh, good, you’re babbling,” Dorian says. “No I’m not going to bring you soup. I’m going to send you something even better.”

Delivery?

Well, probably a good compromise. Also very nice of him.

“I love you,” she says.

“How much medicine did you take?” he asks.

“Not enough.” Her face still feels like someone tried to jam a pair of slugs up her nostrils, after all.

Dorian sighs.

“Someone is coming. Don’t worry if you hear the door open,” he tells her. “And for godsakes drink some water, the sound of your voice is giving my throat sympathy pains.”

“Okay,” she agrees.

The phone beeps as she hangs up, and almost immediately falls asleep again instead.

Just a few seconds later, it seems, there are cool fingers brushing across her forehead.

They press against the side of her cheek. She leans in towards them, and sighs. Her head feels like a furnace, and her throat is absolutely killing her. She blinks, bleary, and looks up to see a blurry bald shape resolve into worried eyes and furrowed brows.

“Solas,” she realizes.

Then she devolves into a coughing fit.

She tries to aim it into the blankets so she won’t hit him with it. His hand moves to her back, and when she finishes a glass of water is being eased into her hands.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were sick?” he asks.

He sounds sad.

Oh no.

“’M sorry. Thought I’d sleep it off,” she mumbles, before sipping the water. The blessed, beautiful water. “Time’s it?”

“Twelve thirty two,” he tells her.

Hey.

Hey, he’s supposed to be at his shop.

She pokes him.

“Work?” she asks, very coherently and logically, of course.

He gets what she’s driving at, though.

“It’s fine,” he tells her. “What did you take and when did you take it?”

That question’s a little much for her at the moment. She sips some more water as she figures out the answer, and manages to translate it into reasonably understandable words and everything. Look at her, communicating like a functional adult! Solas tuts at her and keeps up the soothing hand motions – his hands are so nice, why are his hands so nice? – until she finishes her water, and then he takes the glass and goes away for a while.

He comes back an indeterminate length of time later, carrying a tray burdened with soup and tea and another glass of water, and a book.

She grumbles a bit as he nudges her to sit up, more at herself than at him.

Solas arranges the tray over her lap, and then climbs onto the other side of the bed. She takes up the spoon and he takes up the book, and settles in, it seems.

The soup is good, she notes. Carrots, turnips, onions, celery, bits of sweet potato, and the distinctive note of garlic. The broth soothes her throat on the way down. The tea does even better; a spiced blend that helps ease some of the ache in her sinuses, too. She eats slowly, all clouded and fuzzy, but when she finishes she feels distinctly better.

She leans back against the pillows, slouching sideways until she reaches Solas.

“Finished?” he asks, and moves to get up.

She catches his arm.

“Thank you,” she says. “You’re so good. Why are you so good?”

He brushes his fingers across her forehead again.

“Shhh,” he says, and gently pries her off so he can carry away the tray.

He comes back, though, and sits down on the bed again. Up near the pillows. Which is good, because it means she can burrow up against his hip, and he can rub soothing circles on her back when she coughs, and he’s perfect at that. She pats his thigh and tells him so, while he reads his book.

“You’re the best thing ever,” she tells him.

“Have you had any alcohol today?” he wonders, all furrow-browed and worried again.

“No,” she murmurs. “Why does everyone ask that when’m sick?”

That makes him laugh at little, for some reason. Which is a vast improvement over his being all worry-faced. Good. Yes. She fixed it. This is going well. She pats his knee to show her approval, and then ends up just sort of snuggling his leg while she curls around him and drifts in and out of sleep.

At some point he starts talking.

No, reading.

He starts reading aloud to her. Something about Antivan courtly intrigues from three hundred years ago. There are assassins. It gives her vague daydreams about running around trying to save Josephine from hired killers who lock people in closets, while Leliana loudly asks why they can’t just assassinate everyone back and be done with it. She honestly can’t come up with a good answer to that.

“Leliana would be a terrifying assassin,” she mentions to Solas, at some point.

“I imagine so,” he agrees, running long fingers across her scalp.

It’s very nice.

She tells him as much, before she falls asleep again.

He wakes her up to feed her more soup, and make her drink water, and help her to the bathroom. He goes away for a while and comes back again, and gives her medicine, and smiles when she tries to explain to him why his face is actually  _perfect._

_“_ I am pleased you approve of it,” he tells her.

“I do,” she says, and wishes she could kiss him. But she’s all gross and the actual prospect of kissing in and of itself doesn’t seem appealing, so she just snuggles his leg again instead.

She falls asleep. Dreams, or half-dreams and drifts, listening to his voice and falling into the fog of warmth. After a while she registers him leaving once more. He brushes a kiss to her forehead and says something, but she forgets what. She kind of thinks he’s going home, for some reason.

But then she wakes in the night, and the room is dark, but the other side of the bed is definitely occupied.

Her head is much clearer. There’s an arm just lightly around her, resting on her hip over top of the blankets. She feels uncomfortably hot as she shifts, and her shifting merits a murmur from behind. The arm tightens around her, and Solas pulls her towards his chest.

“You’re going to catch it,” she warns, in a voice that’s just a little bit less like death turned over. She swallows, and grimaces at the taste in her mouth.

“I change the pillowcases,” he tells her.

When did he do that?

Not that it’s some kind of foolproof anti-sickness barrier.

But the damage is probably already done. 

Well, at least if he gets sick, she can take care of him, too.

She lets out a sigh, and squirms around until she’s a little more comfortable. Gets her arm over his, and drops her head onto a cooler section of her pillow. He murmurs something she doesn’t quite catch.

“Hmm?”

“Are you feeling any better?” he wonders.

She pats his hand.

“Yes,” she tells him. “You make everything better.”

And, well.

It’s true.


	11. Feast Day (NSFW)

Feast Day is, of course, not a Dalish holiday.

* * *

 

A lot of elves still exchange gifts around this time of year anyway, though. Plenty of non-Dalish have taken up the holiday for themselves. And there _is_ the winter solstice, though that’s really more about honouring the gods and exchanging stories and bonding with your clan than the massive ‘gifts and feasting’ debacle that is the human holiday (attempts on behalf of various corporations to encourage ‘new’ winter solstice gift-giving traditions notwithstanding).

It’s a good time of year for business, though. Especially if one isn’t celebrating it themselves, and therefore has no qualms with working through the holiday. Lots of catering opportunities abound, and staying open on Feast Day usually sees a flood of patrons as most human-owned and operated businesses close their doors.

She’s accustomed to having a fair chunk of the city’s dwarven population on her doorstep for Feast Day, along with most of the Dalish elves who live and/or work in Kirkwall, plenty of qunari, and what Merrill once dubbed the ‘sad humans who don’t have anyone to celebrate with’ crowd. Though that’s, in her opinion, a somewhat inaccurate assessment; or even if it isn’t at the start, by then end of the day it usually is. Every year Bull shows up for the dinner rush, along with ‘Dalish’ and Rocky, and a giant sack of cheap gifts that he flings at anyone who looks even remotely sad or lonesome.

Depending on whether or not he’s on speaking terms with his family, Dorian may or may not turn up and join in.

It’s a pretty good setup, and it doesn’t occur to her that things might be a little different this year until she wakes up the week before the holiday, and suddenly realizes that she has _no idea_ if her boyfriend celebrates it or not.

For some reason, in the hazy light of quarter past five in the morning, this thought manifests with a sense of urgency that has her poking said boyfriend awake from where he’s stretched out beside her, snoring gently. He’s doing that thing where he’s managed to smush his face directly between their pillows, as if he was trying to roll over onto hers during the night but got stuck halfway.

He blinks, blearily, as he wakes up, and mumbles something vaguely apologetic before rolling over.

“No,” she says, barely conscious herself. She snuggles up to spoon him, which earns her a sleepy pat to the arm she snakes around him. “Are you gonna be open on Feast Day?”

Because obviously, _that’s_ the best way to ask if he celebrates it.

There’s a pause, and she thinks maybe he’s fallen straight back asleep, until she feels him shift a little. His head turns around, but she’s burrowed deep into the blankets and is right up against his back, so his odds of him actually being able to look at her are pretty much nil.

“Yes,” he says.

“D’you celebrate?” she asks. He’s all warm and sleepy and he smells all Solas-y. It’s nice. His shirt’s riding up high and his fuzzy winter pyjama pants have slipped low. She smooths one of her palms over the soft skin of his stomach, and nuzzles at the backs of his shoulders.

“Not typically. Do you?” he asks, shuffling his hips a little. His voice is rough.

“Nope,” she murmurs.

The strange sense of urgency bleeds out of her. She sighs, half her hand slipping underneath the waistband of his pants. Something nonsensical and vaguely affectionate hums out of her. She’s falling back to sleep, though, tension gone for the moment. A few blinks and then she drifts off again. Warm and happy and momentarily satisfied.

When she wakes up again, the room’s brighter. She’s on her back, pillows all askew, as Solas squishes her and presses drowsy kisses to the side of her neck. When she stretches, one of his hands snakes up to fondle her breast. She makes a totally dignified sound that is definitely not a barely-coherent giggle, and feels him grin against her.

She brushes a hand over the back of his head. Wiggles a little closer, and _aha,_ that’s some definite morning wood poking at her hip, there.

“Good morning,” she purrs, with a grin of her own.

“Good morning,” Solas returns. Then he goes back to kissing her neck, and shifts his hips up against her. It’s all a sort of uncoordinated jumble of limbs and caresses and impulses for a while, then. She entertains the hazy idea that it would be fun to make him come in his ridiculous fuzzy pants, and shifts around until she can grind against him through their pyjamas. One of her arms is pinned underneath him. She squirms until she’s got both of them around him, and then she closes her hands over his ass, and squeezes, and presses him firmly against her.

He squeaks.

Actually _squeaks_ in surprise. It shakes a full laugh out of her, which wakes her up a bit more.

He buries his face against the pillow.

“That did not happen,” he says.

“That was adorable,” she tells him, before she bites her lip and repeats the motion.

He doesn’t squeak again – sadly – but he does groan beautifully. His head slants back, and she gets a good look at his face. Cheeks pink, lips slightly parted; eyelashes fluttering. Her gaze fixes onto the slope of his jaw, the line of his neck, the bob of his adam’s apple. His dimpled chin. She can feel the press of him through the fabric of their clothes, hot and hard.

Too gorgeous.

She _definitely_ has to make him come in his pants.

For revenge.

For being so gorgeous.

Yeah, that makes sense.

His hips jerk, sending a bolt of heat straight through her as she presses back into him. Seeking some friction.

He seizes the opening of her distraction and rolls back, pulling her on top of him. _Good idea,_ she thinks, and before he can finish sliding his hands down her back, she pins his wrists to the mattress. Her grin turns just ever-so-slightly wicked as she grinds into him and works her hips against him. The muscles in his wrists twitch as he bucks upwards.

When he finally comes, she watches his face. The way his lips part and his breath hitches, and his eyes close as he goes still, trembling through the rush of pleasure. Morning breath or no she _has_ to kiss him, then. She lets go of his wrists so she can cup his face and languidly drink him in.

He gets his hands on her hips, as she does, and slides her own pyjama bottoms down.

She jumps at the sudden feeling of cold air on bared skin. He breathes an apology against her lips, but then makes up for it with his fingers; slipping one into her before dragging it back out again, and then circling her clit. Her mouth drifts away from his. As he presses against her, she finds herself leaning into his shoulder. Biting at the collar of his shirt.

She clutches at him when she comes. He brushes a kiss to her temple, and drags the blankets back over both of them.

“Ma vhenan,” he murmurs, fondly.

“This really is a good morning,” she decides.

He chuckles. It makes his chest vibrate beneath her cheek.

“What time is it?” he wonders, after a breath.

“Probably ‘get up now or be late for work’ o’clock,” she muses, twisting just enough to start at the digital clock blinking at them from his bedside table. “Yup. I was right,” she confirms.

Damn.

And it would be so nice to just stay in bed forever, too.

If the face Solas makes when they both finally manage to sit up is any indication, he agrees with that assessment. She offers him a gentle, consoling pat on the ass as she drags her pants back up.

“There, there,” she says.

He shoots her a wry look before he heads into the bathroom.

 

~

 

The matter of Feast Day is mostly put aside again in her mind, then, apart from the usual business of, well, business. And procuring gifts for her friends who _do_ celebrate. Simple, non-ceremonial and polite stuff, mostly. She gets Cassandra and Leliana gift cards and bakes a batch of gingersnaps for Sera, and then on consideration, does up some for Cole, too. Sends off some goodie baskets and cards and makes her usual charity donation to the clinic.

There’s a lot to do with the holiday orders to fill, and with Cassandra and Leliana both taking the actual day off. That’s okay, though. One of the local kids – Feynriel – has a Dalish mother, and she’s hired him the past couple of years to help fill in. This one’s no different. He can’t bake worth a damn, but he’s perfectly capable of handling the register and wiping down tables.

She’s a little surprised to find Cassandra at the shop on Feast Day morning.

“My oven is not working,” her friend says. “I have something still left to prepare, and I was wondering if…?”

She waves a hand through the air.

“Say no more. As long as it doesn’t interfere with business, go right ahead and use ours,” she declares.

It earns her a smile, and a nod of gratitude.

Cassandra insists on helping set the shop up while she’s there, anyway, despite her assurances that she really can just, y’know, enjoy her time off. Her friend puts together a small, personal-sized fruit cake. The beautiful, fresh kind, that actually looks somewhat edible, with candied fruit and pecans sprinkled on top of apricot butter icing. It smells spicy and delish when she pulls it from the oven.

It’s clearly a gift, if the way Cassandra fusses over the garnish is any indication.

“Who’s it for?” she wonders.

Her friend pauses, and then leans down to retrieve a small cake box.

“Just someone.”

Cassandra’s voice wavers oddly for a moment.

She raises an eyebrow. But before she can even begin to tackle the implications of _that_ kind of response, she has the business rush to deal with. Morning’s a lot of people who don’t feel like cooking breakfast when they’re planning on feasting later. It’s not quite the crowd it usually is, though.

Across the street, there’s a line up spilling out of the door.

“Abelas makes this fantastic ginger drink. It warms you all the way through,” Cassandra tells her. “And it tastes amazing as well. Very spicy, but not overwhelming. I gather that the recipe is quite old. Ah, only from… hearsay. Of course.”

She blinks at her friend.

Cassandra finishes tying the bow around her cake box, avoiding eye-contact all the while.

“Have you been…?”

“I have to run. I hope all goes well. Happy Feast Day!”

Her eyes narrow as she watches her best friend slash loyal employee beat a hasty retreat from her shop. The woman doesn’t, at least, head _directly_ across the street, but still. If Cassandra’s been sampling the competition’s products, she’s going to…

To…

…Do something, probably. Be extremely disappointed. At least.

This is war, dammit and so forth.

“Feynriel,” she says, with a long look through the windows. “He’s bamboozling my employees and stealing business from us, and I’m not even mad.”

“I could wear a festive hat?” Feynriel suggests.

“No, hon, the jingly bell hats are culturally insensitive. In this part of town you’ll just piss people off,” she tells him, with a pat on the shoulder.

“Oh,” he says.

Then it’s back to the rush.

They still do good business. She squints when she sees Cole take to the sidewalk with free samples, though. Chocolate marshmallow snowballs with coconut sprinkles, it looks like.

Dammit, Solas. That beautiful, devious bastard is _enticing_ people into his shop. On Feast Day. When they practically flood any open restaurant or bakery anyway. Giving free food away on a holiday. Shit. She squints as she sees some of her usual evening customers stop and try a few of the samples.

Well two can play at that game.

During a lull she gets a batch of bacon-and-mushroom tarts going, and then sends Feynriel off to go and recruit a couple of his friends who might be interested in making a quick buck. Then she sets them up with the trays outside.

By the time the lunch rush rolls around, the doors to both shops are open as often as not. Sweet and savoury scents spill out into the streets. Solas sends Cole back out with a tray full of blueberry swirl cheesecake squares. She counters with salted pistachio brittle. Familiar faces seem to navigate the street between both shops, to the point where she stops blinking when she sees her own friends and supposed allies lining up for their lunch while blatantly nursing spicy-scented ginger… coffee? For the sake of her sanity she’s going to assume it’s some kind of coffee, still steaming in the festive cups from across the street.

Round three, in the lull after the lunch rush has completely died down, sees Cole re-emerge from the shop burdened down with vanilla slices. Ha! Hollow puff pastry sweetness. One step away from eating crunchy air and powdered sugar, she thinks, and counters with potato cake samplers with smoked salmon and cream cheese.

The dinner rush swerves sharply in her favour. She’d like to think it was the potato cakes, but when Bull finishes his customary gift-giving rounds only to produce another sack and head across the street, Solas definitely steals the dessert crowd, hands down.

Well.

She’ll let him have dessert, she supposes.

And she didn’t even realize how much she was _doing_ , running around throwing in all of that extra baking and coordinating Feynriel and his friends, talking to customers, until they finally hit closing time and she’s still sitting on the tail edge of an adrenaline rush. She gets the last order out, and sends her helpers off with their pay, and then slumps down at one of the tables.

About ten minutes later, there’s a tap at the door.

She looks up, ready to offer an apologetic headshake to whichever late-running customer has decided to try their luck, and instead blinks at Solas. He’s smiling. Dressed in his street clothes – she’s still in her apron, she realizes – with the edges of his forest green sweater vest visible through the open front of his jacket.

With a groan, she gets back on her feet, and opens the door.

“I won,” Solas breathes, with a grin, before he sweeps in and kisses her.

Her hands slip around his waist, burrowing into the warmth of his jacket and the soft fabric of his vest before her brain processes what he just said.

She pulls back.

“You won _what?”_ she asks him.

He snorts.

“As if you do not know,” he says.

Smug bastard.

“You absolutely did not win. I got the dinner crowd,” she counters, as he swoops in for another kiss.

Holy shit.

He’s practically _vibrating_ with excitement.

Apparently she’s not the only one to have spent the day running around on competitive adrenaline highs.

“A minor dip. I had the most customers at closing,” he insists, stealing another kiss. A deep, delving one that makes her mouth tingle and her toes curl.

It takes her a minute to remember that he’s being ridiculous.

“Nope,” she says, popping the ‘p’ before she leans back in and pecks him again. “Winner gets dinner. See? It even rhymes.”

“Rhyming hardly makes it true,” he counters. But it seems like he can’t stop smiling, unless it’s to lean in and kiss her. And even then, the corners of his mouth turn upwards most of the time anyway. He slides a hand down and gives her ass an unexpected pinch.

She jumps a little, and laughs against his lips.

Then she leans back, and lets her gaze trail slowly over him, and licks her lips. He shivers in her arms.

“Good thing it’s quitting time,” she says. “I think I’m about ready to take you home.”

“And here I was, entirely prepared to sweep _you_ away,” Solas counters.

Then he leans back a little, though, and reaches into one of his coat pockets. She blinks as he produces a slim, golden box, tied with a simple white bow. Her heart stutters a bit as he presents to her, with an ever-so-slight flourish.

“Happy Feast Day,” he says.

She swallows.

“I though you didn’t celebrate. I didn’t get you anything,” she says, momentarily wrong-footed by the appearance of the gift.

Solas’ smile softens.

“I purchased nothing,” he says. “I do not truly celebrate. I just… wished to give it to you, and the occasion presented itself. Reciprocation is wholly unnecessary.”

She looks at him a moment, but he doesn’t seem to be the least bit disappointed, or insincere.

With a sigh, she accepts the gift.

Inside the box she finds a simple chain, plain silver, with an old bone charm hanging from it. She pauses, and looks more closely at it. Elvhen, definitely. Pale, and carved in the shape of a wolf’s head. Very beautiful. The sort of thing she’d have expected a keeper or first to own.

“What is it?” she asks, momentarily entranced.

“Just a little thing. It has been in my family a few generations, but I believe it is Dalish in origin,” Solas explains.

It definitely _looks_ it, but…

“It’s an heirloom?” she asks.

He shrugs.

“Technically, perhaps. Just a small one. I have several such pieces,” he assures her, in an uncommonly dismissive manner, considering his typical regard for antiquated things, and his reluctance to ever part with them.

She looks at him a moment.

Then she slips the chain carefully over her neck, and leans in, and kisses him soundly.

“I love it,” she tells him.

His eyes are bright as he smiles at her.

“Good,” he replies.


	12. The Sweater (NSFW)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I forgot to post this one here! Shame on me.

Planning weddings should not be this hellish.

They should elope, Lavellan thinks to herself, when she finally gets home from an entire day off spent trying on increasingly ridiculous dresses. She’d been sort of inclined to just shrug and go with the first one that didn’t look bad, but it hadn’t felt _right,_  apparently, and Cassandra had given her a _look,_ and in the end she’d tried on what seemed like a hundred dresses and still left the shop empty-handed.

She’s thinking maybe she needs to… well. Maybe she can write to Deshanna, and find out if anyone in the clan still makes wedding dresses, or if not, where they usually get them from these days…

When she gets inside Solas’ apartment, she hears the sound of the shower running.

And that’s another thing, she thinks. Apartments. Housing.  Finding a place for them both to live, together, in peace and harmony, that isn’t her apartment because Solas thinks her apartment is just shy of being a death trap, and isn’t his apartment because once he said that her apartment was a death trap she wasn’t going to let him _win._ And also it’s… not a bad apartment, but she’d probably go crazy if she had to bump elbows with him in that tiny bathroom every single morning.

She sighs and shrugs her coat off, drops her purse onto the little bench by his door and pads her way into the bedroom to change into something more comfortable. Hopefully, it will be the absolute _last_ time she has to change clothes today.

She trips over Solas’ pants on the floor, and discovers they’re absolutely covered in something sticky and caked-on. Must’ve been an interesting day at the shop. She drops them into the almost-overflowing hamper, pulls on a pair of loose pants and steals one of his shirts, and goes back to the living room to raid his bookshelf.

A few minutes later, the shower cuts off.

A few minutes more, and she can hear him rummaging around in the bedroom, taking a lot longer than usual.

With a faint hint of concern, she puts her book down and heads in to see what the problem is.

The sight that greets her is…

Well.

Apparently Solas is in a ‘comfy clothes’ kind of a mood today too, because he’s wearing one of this biggest, snuggliest sweaters. She knows because it’s one of her favourites to steal. The thing is absolutely _massive,_ jewel-tone blue and handstitched from the softest material she’s ever felt in her life. It’s tunic-shaped, long enough to cover the tops of his thighs, and the sleeves are huge enough to frequently fall past even Solas’ wrists. The collar is wide and loose and drapes just shy of falling completely off of his shoulders.

He is wearing the sweater, and nothing else, glaring at his drawers in what she suspects has become a fruitless search for clean pants.

Since he’s… not wearing any.

And all.

She leans in the doorway, and drinks in the sight of those legs, momentarily stunned by just how _appealing_ this picture is. Somehow the sweater makes them look longer than usual, and when he reaches to check the top shelf of his drawers, she notes that he isn’t wearing any underwear, either. 

Not that she gets a full show; just a slight hint, as a back corner of the sweater rides up higher than where his boxers would fall. One of the artful(?) slits up the side stretched over his hip, just vaguely hinting at the curve of his buttock.

Guh.

“Vhenan, have you seen my…?” he starts, but trails off when he turns and sees her watching him.

She supposes her expression isn’t doing a lot to disguise the general tone of her thoughts.

To her absolutely delight, he actually colours, a little. And clears his throat.

“I cannot find any clean pants,” he admits.

She pushes away from the door frame, and saunters into the room.

“Okay,” she says. “No more pants. Works for me.”

He laughs in surprise, the corners of his eyes crinkling as she gets close enough to grab hold of his sweater. Which she does. His sweater which he is naked under.

“I may require them at some point, you know,” he says, lips twitching.

Hmm. Lips.

She leans up and kisses them, tasting the faint remnants of something cherry flavoured on him. The latest baking disaster, she suspects. One of her hands fists in the front of his sweater, reeling him in close, while the other trails towards the hem. Then slips under, and cups his ass. She feels his breath catch as she breaks off the kiss.

“Nah,” she says. “It’s fine. You can quit work. Stay at home, wearing nothing but sweaters and reading books all day. I’ll support you.”

“Oh you will, will you?” he purrs, fixing his own hands onto her hips. One of his legs slides between hers, and he grinds against her.

“Mmhmm,” she breathes, kissing him again.

Then she drags him sideways, and without any further ado, pushes him onto the mattress. The sweater rides up completely, slipping over his hips. He laughs, like it’s silly, and maybe it is. But he’s rumpled and bared to her, the deep blue rich against his pale, freckled skin, and she kinda wants to devour him, to be completely honest.

She starts by shucking the sweater up even higher and teasing his nipples for a bit. Until his laughter tapers off into deeper, breathier sounds that make the heat in her spread. Then she gets to the point, sliding down his body, taking his cock in hand and playfully cupping his balls. She pauses long enough to snatch a condom and a bottle of lotion from the nightstand.

He tries to sit up.

She catches him with a kiss, and then yanks up bottom of the sweater so it’s over his head.

“Caught you, vhenan,” she says with a laugh, before squeezing some of the lotion onto her palm.

He shudders when she starts working the lotion onto him. After a few seconds he rolls the sweater down enough to look at her, as she pumps at him a little. As she slips her hand down, coaxing his legs further apart so she can circle one finger gently over his sphincter.

“Alright?” she asks him.

He swallows, and nods, easy enough that she’s not worried.

She keeps it up, slow circles before she sinks the first tentative digit into him. He bites his lip. Plush flesh caught by the white edge of his teeth. Cock hard and erect, sweater still all tangled around him.

Perfect.

She pulls back to get more lotion, and to slide the condom into place. The next time she sinks a finger into him, she swallows down as much of him as she can. He bucks upwards, reflexively, and stops biting his lip long enough to bite the sweater instead.

He _bites_ the _sweater._

She is going to _die._

With a very pointed growl she pins him down with her free hand, slinging her arm across his hips, and works a second finger into him as she drags her lips over his length. After a little while, she finds how to press her fingers in just the right way to make him twitch and shake and beg. She pushes the advantage for everything it’s worth, her own arousal almost overwhelming.

He comes with a choked-off cry, head thrown back, hips straining upwards.

She pulls off of him, satisfied even if she wasn’t the one who came.

“Hmm, yeah, I’m definitely going to keep you,” she decides, crawling up to kiss his already-breathless lips. “My Beautiful Pantsless Future Husband.”

He sighs at her.

“Always such dignified appellations you give me,” he murmurs. But he’s got that look on his face, now. The one he always gets whenever she starts throwing the word ‘husband’ around. The one that makes her heart flip and a few loose butterflies get tangled in her stomach.

She kisses him again, and slips her clean hand down to tend to herself.

He catches her by the wrist.

“I believe it is my turn, now, vhenan,” he says, and with surprising coordination – considering he’s still twitching through some aftershocks – he flips them over, and presses her into the mattress beneath him. He pulls the sweater off completely, and then licks at her neck as she starts grinding up against his thigh.

Her pants ride low, and then lower still once he manages to work a hand into them.

His hands really are very nice. Long and nimble fingers. Excellent at precision tasks, like decorative baking, and elegant penmanship, and making her squirm and curse and press into him and maybe bite his ear a little bit. Maybe. Before he pulls back and tugs down her clothes, and replaces his fingers with his mouth. Hot tongue and warm lips, wavering between playful and intent.

She’s too keyed up to last long, though. Her toes curl as he drives her up and then brings her over.

When she’s finished, he rests his cheek against her hip for a moment. He draws his fingers across her skin until she twitches, ticklish. Then she catches his hand, and feels him smile right before he presses another kiss to her skin.

“You might have to wear pants sometimes,” she allows. “I don’t know if we’ll ever actually get anything done otherwise.”

“Hmm. That _would_ make it slightly more difficult for me to marry you,” he agrees.

“Then again, we could always just cancel the wedding and live in sin forever,” she reasons.

He tilts his head, looking up at her.

“I take it you had a marvelous and successful time at the dress shop?” he guesses.

Reaching down, she brushes a hand over his head.

“I’m thinking we’ll just get married in our aprons,” she decides.

It makes him laugh, and sit up at last.

“We could elope,” he says. Mostly playful, but there’s just the faintest hint of sincerity to the suggestion. She props herself up on her elbows, and takes note.

“Our friends would kill us,” she points out. “I mean, it’s not my favourite pastime ever, but I’ll survive the dress thing. And I thought you were having a good time with most of it.”

He shrugs. Then glances slightly away, towards the window.

“I have been. The planning is not a problem for me. It is only…”

He sighs, and starts carefully tightening the lid on the bottle of lube sitting beside him. Not that it needs tightening. She gives him a minute, torn between the urge to wait him out, and the desire to go get cleaned up. The former wins out by a wide margin.

“You know there is some estrangement between myself and my family,” he ventures.

Ah.

Yeah.

That’s maybe come up a time or two. The whole ‘wayward son of an incredibly wealthy family full of assholes he’d generally be happy never to speak to again’ bit. Not that she dwells on it very much. It’s kind of weird to think about. Makes her feel like her life’s turned into even _more_ of a romcom than it already was.

“You can invite them if you want, but you don’t have to,” she says.

He sighs again.

“I had not intended to. My plan was to, perhaps, send them some notification after the fact. Or none at all,” he admits. “Until this morning, when I received a formal letter from the desk of our matriarch’s secretary, informing me that my family was _delighted_ to hear about our impending nuptials and would be very pleased to attend.”

She blinks, and then raises an eyebrow.

“How’d they know?” she wonders. Did someone well-meaning but obtuse send Solas’ family an invitation? She can’t really see it happening. Maybe Cole might know enough about Solas’ family and be… awkward enough, in some ways, to make that kind of attempt. But her gut says no. Cole might misstep on occasion, but when he met Varric’s brother, he _did_ tell him to shove a cactus up his ass.

Which was awesome.

But is beside the point.

“The only person who could have told them is my lawyer,” Solas says. “Whom I have since released from my services. But the matter remains, they are intent upon coming. According to the letter, they’ll be here in two weeks.”

Wait.

What?

“We’re not getting married until next month,” she feels compelled to point out.

“We could flee,” Solas suggests. “Extend our apologies to our friends, and leave the city before they arrive. We could get married in Highever. Or Antiva. Antiva is quite pleasant this time of year.”

_“Or,_ we could tell them to take a hike. Considering they aren’t actually invited,” she suggests. “If you don’t want to see them, I’ll do it myself.” It wouldn’t be the first time she’s had to send someone’s asshole relatives packing. Dorian’s father practically flees at the sight of her these days. “Or not even _myself._ Getting rid of unwanted relatives is almost a Kirkwall tradition at this point. I could probably have the entire airport flooded with dangerous-looking goons fit to scare any rich elves back onto their plane in no time flat. I could bring Sera. And _bees._ ”

Solas looks surprisingly touched, and not a little tempted.

But then he sighs, and she’s pretty sure they’re shit out of luck. For some reason.

Family’s complicated like that.

“No. I appreciate it, vhenan, but it is better if I deal with them,” he decides.

“If it all goes south, I’ll fight them for your hand,” she promises.

His lips twitch.

He leans down, and presses them to hers.

“Thank you,” he says.

She can tell, though, that he kind of doesn’t believe her. That he thinks she means it metaphorically, or something. Which is fine. But if it comes to it, she’s not above throwing a few punches. She has connections in this city. Some of them are even people with money. Some of them are _Vivienne_ and _Cassandra._ And Varric. And Varric’s connections.

Leaning up, she kisses him back, a little more pointedly.

“I will fight them,” she reiterates, patting his leg.

“Do not fight them,” he advises.

“I will fight all of them.”

“Vhenan.”

“How many are coming? Ten? A hundred? I’ll fight a hundred rich elves. Wear the sweater again and I’ll fight _two_ hundred rich elves.”

Solas makes a sound halfway between a laugh and a groan, and topples a bit, resting his head onto the mattress beside hers.

“This is, in fact, somewhat serious,” he says.

She brushes his cheek with the back of her hand.

“I know,” she assures him. “That’s why I’m willing to resort to violence.”

The look he gives her then is one she has mentally dubbed ‘reluctantly smitten’. She’s pretty sure it’s a look she wears even more frequently than he does. It’s very heavy on the ‘smitten’ and light on the ‘reluctantly’. To the point where ‘reluctantly’ could maybe be dropped at this point, but they aren’t married _yet_ so she’s keeping the name for now.

Reluctantly smitten.

Definitely not ‘deeply in love’.

She kisses his nose, and then finally sits up and heads for the bathroom.

When she comes back out, he’s wearing the sweater again. And still searching for pants.

Maybe a little less urgently that before. With more posing around the drawers.

Pointedly.

She comes up behind him and wraps her arms around him, and kisses the back of his neck.

“Is this your way of asking me to fight two hundred rich elves for you?” she wonders.

He laughs.

“I do actually need to finish getting dressed sometime,” he points out.

“Mmhmm. Oh, yes, I’m _completely_ convinced of your innocent intentions,” she murmurs, as she tugs his entirely unresisting form back to the bed for Round Two.

Technically, though, she’s pretty sure this counts as permission for her to fight all of his family.

Wins all around.


	13. Kitchen Appliances (NSFW)

Her home kitchen is… pretty good.

It’s good.

It works, anyway. 

She makes it work. 

It’s got a few quirks, but, what kitchen doesn’t? And obviously it’s never been up to the same standards as her equipment in the shop, but that’s her professional stuff. That’s where most of her kitchen budget _goes_.

Two weeks into wedding planning, the bottom element on her oven burns out. Just, dies, ignominiously, right in the middle of cooking a quiche.

She gives it a betrayed look, and ends up having to trash the quiche, and order delivery for dinner instead. Solas shows up while she’s messing around with it, trying to figure out if it’s _dead_ -dead or if it’s just… pretending, maybe? It’s right around the same time that the nice delivery girl from the Antivan place down the road gets to her door, and so she doesn’t have time to stop him from paying for everything. By the time she hears the voices and realizes what’s up, Solas is already walking in, cartons in hand.

Her ridiculously gorgeous boyfriend. Who pays for stuff, and things.

Damn him.

He takes one look at her where she’s kneeling on her kitchen floor, and makes a face. 

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“Element died,” she explains, with a sigh. It’s well and truly dead, she thinks. She shoves the oven racks back into place, and goes to wash her hands, doing some mental calculations. She can check and see if Dagna’s got any parts that make suit. The wedding’s got her budget pulled thin - Solas has managed to wrangle his way into paying for most stuff, but she’s still pitching in on the catering and her dress - but even so. If Dagna can get her own, it’ll probably be pennies. If not, still doable.

Not that it’d be the end of the world even if it wasn’t. The top burner still works, so she can broil things. And she knows for a fact that Cassandra has a spare toaster oven that she never uses. Birthday gift from her uncle, who always, in her opinion, seems to be just making wild guesses at what a single working woman might need in her life. Possibly informed by his consultations with two hundred year old ghosts.

The year before last he’d given her a scythe and a bag of flower the size of a small child.

Solas starts glaring at her kitchen appliances in that way he does when he secretly thinks they’re all possessed by evil ghosts that are plotting her murder. He frowns at her oven, and settles the take away cartons onto the counter. 

“May I have a look?” he requests.

“Knock yourself out,” she permits, with a shrug. “But maybe after dinner. Midday crowd was ravenous, and I haven’t eaten anything since breakfast.”

Walking over, she leans up and steals a kiss, first. Solas settles his hands against her lower back, and chases her mouth when she tries to pull away, until she smirks and kisses his nose instead. It wrinkles, just a little bit. Freckles scrunching and eyes crinkling, before he lets her go.

“Dinner first, then,” he agrees, with one last frown at her oven.

The Antivan place down the street is a good joint, and they give her a deal on delivery in exchange for free coffees whenever the owners are by her shop in the morning. She chats idly with Solas about everything and nothing, flitting through topics that range from gossip to ideas for flower arrangements to Orlesian and Rivaini wedding traditions, to the latest book he’s discovered, to the newest additions to her Netflix roster.

She’s washing off the dishes when he finally gets around to poking at her oven, and confirming that it is, indeed, fucked.

Moderately fucked, but still.

“I’m gonna see if I can get a part from Dagna. Way cheaper. The hardware up near Hightown will carry one, otherwise, but they like to overcharge me.” Her professional kitchen supplier probably won’t have anything the right size, but she supposes she can check with them, too.

Solas’ frown deepens at the mention of the hardware store.

“I would offer a spare, but I actually used mine last week,” he admits. “Cole managed to flood my oven during an experiment.”

“The rhubarb thing?” she asks.

He nods, once, in confirmation, and she winces. The whole kitchen had smelled like burnt rhubarb for _days_. Solas had all but moved in with her here while the place aired out.

“Well,” he says, nodding to himself. “You are welcome to use my oven. In point of fact, you should simply stay with me until it is replaced.”

She raises an eyebrow at him.

“The last time I used your kitchen, you flipped out.”

Standing up from the oven, he lets the door bang shut, and gives her a Look.

“I did not ‘flip out’,” he insists. “I merely… worried. Somewhat.”

“You made me read the manual for your blender,” she points out. The fact that he even _let_  Cole cook in there is probably a testament to how fond Solas is of him.

“It is a very finicky device,” he defends, and she inches her way towards him. He’s wearing a beige cable-knit sweater that she doesn’t really care for, but underneath he’s got on a soft, grey t-shirt that she’s rather fond of. The material is worn and very smooth, and she recognizes it by touch as she slips her hands around his waist, and underneath his sweater.

Her thumbs brush over the soft skin at the top of his pants.

He shivers, and rests his own arms on her shoulders. His tongue darts out to lick at his lips.

“Seeing as you _have_  read the manual now, though, you may as well use my kitchen,” he murmurs.

She stares unabashedly at his lips, as her own quirk upwards.

“Remember the _last_  thing we did in your kitchen?” she asks.

He flushes just a little bit, resting his hands on her hips.

“Hmm. No. I do not think I do,” he says. “Perhaps you should refresh my memory?”

What a lovely invitation. There’s a wicked rush of playfulness in her as she shifts her grip on him, and before he can properly appreciate what she’s intending, she manages to dip down and get her hands under his legs, and _lift_  him up onto _her_  counter. Just as he’d become so fond of doing to her. It’s a lot of effort - Solas isn’t nearly so bulky as a human, but he’s tall for an elf, and he goes to the gym - but she’s hefted heavier things.

Plus the noise he makes is _hilarious._

She gets him up onto the counter and sets about working his belt open, and for a moment he just looks at her with very wide eyes, and very large pupils.

“…Well, ah,” he says.

“Objections?” she asks, as she pops the button on his pants.

His throat bobs as he swallows.

“None,” he decides. She grins at him, and he seems to flounder for a moment before bracing himself on the counter. An empty take-away carton gets knocked to the floor, but she decides they can deal with that later. He’s already hardening as she gets his pants down his hips and gets his cock out of his underwear. The delicate, warm flesh feels especially vulnerable today as she takes it into her hand, and leans in to run her tongue across his length.

Solas lets out a little gasp, and his hips twitch. She glances up at him with perfect timing to watch his cheeks start to really flush.

It feels her with a rush of fondness. Beautiful man. Her beautiful, beautiful man.

She works him half-hard into her mouth, running her tongue along him, and it doesn’t take much effort to get him completely erect. Pulling off, she uses her hand awhile instead, with long, careful strokes, and kisses. Pausing every so often to push up his shirt and press her lips to his bellybutton, or the freckles on his abdomen instead. Pulling more little gasps and moans out of him, until she works her thumb against the head of his cock in a way that nearly makes him buck off of the counter.

She grasps his hips, then, and takes him back into her mouth, holding him still as she sucks at him. His gasps turn to curses, and he runs his nails across her scalp, and the countertop squeaks as his other hand scrapes across it. 

Reaching for her as he pants and then spills down her throat.

She nuzzles at him a bit, pressing a few more kisses to his softening flesh before she lets go of his hips.

“Jog your memory?” she asks.

“What?” Solas wonders, glassy-eyed and still panting.

She smirks.

And maybe she does look a little bit too pleased with herself, because his eyes narrow at her, and then he slides down off of the counter; and does admirable job of steadying himself before he pounces on her, in return.

“That was _not_  what we did last time,” he says, low and breathy, in a voice that makes her shift against the growing wetness between her legs.

“Perhaps you should refresh my memory?” she suggests.

He grins, and does.


	14. Crash

She stares at the guest list for her wedding, and finds that she can’t help but wonder how exactly it’s come to this. 

How one phone call to her clan’s keeper to ask about wedding dresses somehow devolved into yelling (because she may have forgotten to mention the whole… getting married bit, before then) and half the clan inviting itself to the ceremony (okay, well, more like six people). How a message from Solas’ lawyer resulted in his estranged, ridiculously wealthy family deciding that they, too, were going to attend (and visit – early). How she even got to the point of _having a wedding._

She looks up at Cassandra, who is looking back at her, and who is also doing a terrible job of pretending not to laugh.

“You are a bad friend,” she says.

“I am excellent friend. And I did warn you this would happen,” Cassandra counters, utterly unsympathetic.

From her other side, Josephine tuts, and carefully pries the guest list away from her fingers.

Six clan members. Eight members of Solas’ asshole family. Thirty-ish various friends and friends-of-friends and plus-one’s from Kirkwall. How did she get a wedding guest list of forty-plus people? _How?_

Josephine is saying something about how anything with less than fifty guests still qualifies as a small wedding. The mind boggles.

Okay. Well. Maybe it doesn’t boggle _too_ much. Most Dalish weddings she’s been to have involved entire clans – sometimes more than one – and that’s generally a lot of people. But that’s different. Dalish weddings are usually hosted out in a field somewhere, with everyone bringing some dish or other on their own to keep the masses fed, and the only really sacred part is the ceremony. They plant _trees_ afterwards. No one really bothers getting too dressed up, not even the bride and groom. She used to bring a tiny shovel and bucket kit when she went to them as a kid, like she was going to the beach. There’s the hand-fastening and the invocations and vows, and then it’s basically just a picnic.

Traditional _elvhen_ weddings of the kind which Solas’ family practices are… more elaborate. And modern city weddings generally expect some fancier stuff, too.

“We’re eloping,” she decides. “I’ll just kidnap him. We’ve got, what, four hours before his family’s supposed to get here? It’s doable. We can just sell the shops. I’ll take him to Val Royeaux, he’ll be so distracted by the frilly cakes and pastries he might not even notice that I’ve completely upended our lives.”

She starts to stand up, and Cassandra gets a hand on her shoulder and firmly pushes her back down.

“No,” the merciless tyrant says. “You are going to have a wedding, and we are going to attend, and it will be perfect. And if we must throw certain members of the Evanuris family off of the docks to achieve that, then we shall.”

Josephine nods in agreement, still pursing her lips at the guest list.

“But no one will just let me rent a field somewhere,” she protests; nevertheless letting herself be drawn back in.

“Oh, my family’s vineyard in Antiva would be a lovely place for a wedding,” Josephine muses, getting a little dreamy-eyed at this prospect.

“Great! Let’s go there,” she suggests. “We can flee the city under cover of darkness. Take Solas and maybe Leliana to help, and get away before anyone else arrives. I’ll pay Hawke to distract Solas’ family. My clan probably won’t look for me in Antiva. It’s all good.”

“Kirkwall’s chantry is quite suitable,” Cassandra suggests, lightly. “I know neither of you are Andrastian, but even as a simple venue it is built for such things…”

Her friend trails off at the look on her face.

“You knew that wasn’t going to fly,” she says.

“It was worth an attempt,” Cassandra insists.

“Compromise,” Josephine says. “Solas is not particular about the venue, you want to do something… outdoors, and given our social group, that might not be a poor idea. What about a beach wedding? Something along the coast?”

“Rain,” Cassandra muses, forebodingly. “The weather reports for the Storm Coast are notoriously unreliable.”

“A garden wedding,” Josephine amends. “The Amells have sponsored that lovely park in Hightown, near to their estate, and to several hotels. We could have an outdoor ceremony and an indoor reception. What do you think?”

Her friend calls up the webpages of several of the nearby venues, and she pages through them, inwardly sighing. At this point ‘building with a roof’ seems acceptable enough. And the idea of an outdoor ceremony has some appeal, overall. Maybe the sentimentalist in her is to blame for that. Most of her clan has gotten married under the sky.

It just seems luckier that way.

“They all look good to me,” she decides. “That’s a great idea, Josephine. Thanks for helping.”

Josephine waves her off.

“Are you kidding? This is what friends are for! Making sure your wedding does not suck is contractual obligation number two on the list.”

“What’s number one?” she wonders, raising an eyebrow.

“Beating up anyone who is mean to you, of course,” Cassandra says.

“Or blackmailing out of the city. Not everyone has to use their fists,” Josephine says.

Well.

Fair enough.

They finish lunch on a high note, and she leaves to go and head back to the shop. Leliana’s on shift, but they’ve got a catering order due in tomorrow morning, and she thinks it’ll be easier to head in and see to as much of it now as she can, rather than waking up before the crack of dawn and dragging herself out of bed to rush through it instead. The little bistro they’re eating at is only a few blocks away.

She looks both ways, waves to her friends, and moves to cross…

…And the red sedan comes tearing out of the parking lot nearby, and the next thing she knows she’s on the pavement, with her ears ringing and the taste of blood in her mouth. A sense of _wrongness_ overwhelming her until pure, blinding pain takes over, and she passes out.

~

She wakes up in an ambulance. Unfamiliar voices speaking, lights in her eyes, something restraining her as someone asks her for her name. Her chest burns and her left arm feels like someone just starting wailing on it with a crowbar and didn’t stop. It’s hard to breathe. Someone in the ambulance gives her oxygen, the mask fitting over her face, but she feels so dizzy and disoriented that she’s abruptly worried that she’ll throw up in the mask.

The ride to the hospital is strange. Everything hurts but she can feel it, at least. She can move her toes and her right hand.

Not her left, though.

It doesn’t feel like she should be conscious for this, but she still is. The paramedics talk to her, getting ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers as the ambulance blares along Kirkwall’s streets, and it doesn’t make any sense. She was right there. How could the driver not have seen her? But if they saw her, why would they want to hit her? It doesn’t make sense. She was careful. She was just a few blocks away from her shop.

Her left arm is killing her.

She doesn’t even realize Cassandra is in the ambulance with her until she starts having even more trouble breathing, and then she blinks past black spots in her vision and there’s a hand around hers, and she looks, and there’s her friend. Right there.

“Everything is going to be alright,” Cassandra tells her.

Why is it so hard to breathe?

What happened to her arm?

“Just breathe,” Cassandra says. “One breath at a time.”

She does it. One breath at a time. _I think I might be panicking,_ she realizes, and tries to stop. It doesn’t really work, but it still seems to make things a little better. A little less disjointed, even as her nerves scream at her and she worries about throwing up again.

The ambulance makes it to the hospital, and the flurry of activity there. A compound fracture and dislocation explain the condition of her arm, which is bad enough to require surgery; apparently her _punctured lung_ is less severe. By the time she gets through it all, her left arm is in the kind of cast that makes her think of comedy movies, where someone ends up in a full-body suit of them. The rest of her feels like one massive bruise. Injuries she’d been too swept up to notice before assert themselves; a swelling blow on the side of her head, scrapes and bruises on her legs, a massive cut down her right arm…

When they finally let Solas in to see her, he looks horrified.

It puts a fresh bolt of alarm in her, even past the fuzzy haze of the painkillers, because Solas is normally so unflappable.

“Hey,” she manages.

All at once, the horror in his expression shifts to something much more comforting, and he moves towards her. His gaze travels over the cast on her arm, and the rest of her. She supposes she really does look how she feels, which is… not tremendous.

One of Solas’ hands glows.

“Docs said no more healing magic,” she tells him, because she remembers that from the flurry of activity. “Not ‘til tomorrow morning. They did too much on my lungs in the ambulance.”

Solas shakes his head, slightly, and the light dispels.

“Of course,” he replies. “Forgive me. I knew that, I just…”

She manages a smile for him, even though her swollen cheek doesn’t want to cooperate.

“Looks worse than it feels, probably. I’m okay,” she promises him, even though she’s not totally clear on that herself. But screw it. She’ll be okay – Solas doesn’t need to add ‘my fiancée died while we were engaged’ to that long list of soap opera tropes he already qualifies for in life. He’d probably end up joining Abelas and Fenris in some sort of Broody Elf club, and then of course their membership would grow because who wouldn’t want to join that club? Solas is gorgeous, and Fenris is like, textbook hot, and Abelas isn’t exactly rough on the eyes, either. It’d turn into some sort of cultural epidemic and then it would be too popular for any of those three to actually keep with it and they wouldn’t even be able to have the sanctuary of their depressing brotherhood to turn to anyway.

“Vhenan,” Solas says. “What are you talking about?”

Was she talking?

Shit.

“I got hit by a car,” she says. She’s not totally sure if she means it as a defense of her current state, or just a continuing, shocked observation on the state of the universe. But it seems to work, because Solas moves closer and brushes a hand across her forehead, and gently folds his fingers in with her available ones. He leans in and kisses her temple.

“I am so sorry,” he says.

She squints at him.

“You weren’t driving,” she tells him. “Who was?”

Were they drunk, maybe? Middle of the day, but, well. It’s Kirkwall. Aveline’s going to string them up by their genitals if that’s the case. A drunk driver got her first husband. It’s common knowledge in the city that getting behind the wheel when you aren’t 100% stone cold sober is a good way to get dead, and not just because you might crash.

“They have not apprehended the driver, yet,” Solas tells her. “Whoever it was fled the scene. They found the car, but it appears to have been stolen.”

He sounds very… stormy, about that.

She frowns, but after a minute, decides it doesn’t really matter for now. There will be medical bills to worry about and recovery, first, and if the look on Solas’ face is anything to go by, she might need to venture a few requests in order to keep him from going on some sort of inadvisable vigilante hunt for the culprit before he gets carried away.

“No vigilantism,” she tells him, tightening her grip on his fingers. “Don’t go. I need you.”

Solas’ expression falls.

“I won’t go,” he promises.

Then he leans in and presses another kiss to her temple.

“I just need to make a few phone calls, alright? I left Cole alone in charge of the shop, and Abelas will have to close.”

“Okay,” she tells him.

Still.

What should be a three minute phone call seems to take a really long while. By the time he comes back, she’s drifting off to sleep. Everything hurts but everything is dulled, and she’s exhausted by it’s also impossible not to pay attention to all of what’s wrong with her. It leaves her in a sort of dreamy, half-awake state for a while, until she feels Solas’ fingers thread through hers again.

“I have you,” he promises.

She drifts off.

 

~

 

She leaves the hospital as soon as the doctors will let her go, which ends up being after just one overnight stay. She sleeps, and in the morning the doctors okay some more spell use on her, and in the end she goes home with a cast still on her arm and some killer bruises here and there, but no longer banging on death’s door.

She’s exhausted, though, and out of it on painkillers enough that she doesn’t even realize Solas has taken her to _his_ apartment until he’s pretty much tucking her into his bed.

“I need to check the shop,” she says. Her laptop’s at her apartment. Shit, she doesn’t even know where her phone is – she had it with her when she got hit. It probably ended up in the middle of the street, getting mowed over by Kirkwall traffic.

“The shop is fine,” Solas tells her. “You need to rest.”

“We had a catering gig,” she murmurs, because they did, and she forgot that before but she remembers it now. With the hazy sort of urgency that comes from being drugged enough to not really feel like she got hit by a car, but not drugged enough to stop caring entirely about life’s responsibilities, she tries to sit back up out of the bed.

Solas gently pushes her down again.

“Cassandra and Leliana are taking care of it,” he tells her. “And they will have my head if you turn up and try to do any work, at this point. For my sake, vhenan. _Rest.”_

Oh, that’s not fair. She’ll do stuff for him that she won’t do for herself, and he knows it. The sneaky, clever bastard. She lets out a breath, and looks at him, though. There’s strain around his eyes, and tension in his lips. In his neck, and shoulders. His hands are gentle on her, but she can see where he’s wavering. He stayed with her overnight, she remembers. Camped out in one of those shitty hospital chairs, and that couldn’t have been fun. She doesn’t think he even left to get something proper to eat.

“Okay,” she decides, lifting her right hand to brush his cheek. “But you need to rest, too.”

“I will,” he assures her.

She pats the bed next to her, but he shakes his head.

“I have a few more calls to make, first. And I am ravenous. Do you want anything to eat?” he checks. She frowns at the mention of more calls, but then the mention of food distracts her. Because he should definitely eat.

She’s not hungry, though. She shakes her head. She’s still straddling the line with her bouts of nausea. The painkillers, probably, although every time she thinks about the shocking crunch of her own bones hitting the pavement, she finds a new motivation for it.

“I’m good. You go ahead,” she tells him.

He nods.

But he doesn’t leave right away, either. He sits beside her on the bed, just looking at her for a few minutes. She pats his cheek, and then lets her hand fall down towards her collar, and gives him a tug, He takes the invitation readily, then, falling gently into her. The cast on her left arm makes it a little more complicated than usual, but she still manages to hug him pretty well. He buries his face against her neck and curls his arms around her.

After a few seconds, his back starts to tremble, and a telling track of moisture starts to spill into her collar.

“It’s okay,” she tells him. “I’m okay.”

“It is _not,”_ he refutes. “You were almost killed. That is unacceptable.”

She huffs.

 _That’s life,_ she thinks she should say. _Accidents happen,_ maybe. _At least I made it through, right?_ she could offer. But somehow the sentiments all stick in her throat, and don’t quite come out. Because the truth is, she was terrified. The idea of dying like that was horrible. And it’s sticking with her, even now that she’s as safe as can be. Chasing the back of her thoughts.

What if she’d died?

“I love you,” Solas says.

“I love you, too,” she replies. That, at least, is entirely true and easy to get out. When was the last time she said it to him, before the accident? She doesn’t remember. What if she’d died and he’d somehow forgotten it, because she wasn’t there to remind him?

“This is my fault,” he claims.

Her brain stalls.

Wait.

What?

“You weren’t driving,” she says. She didn’t get a pretty clear look at the driver, admittedly, but she’s fairly certain that Solas doesn’t got around stealing cars. Or mowing down his friends and loved ones, for that matter.

Solas is quiet for a long moment. Still sagging against her. He’s angled downwards, she realizes. Close enough to her chest that he can listen to her heartbeat.

She gets her right hand up and brushes it across the back of his head.

“Hey,” she says. “Even if it _was_ your fault, you’re worth it. Alright? I’d face down more than a rogue sedan to make it to the altar with you.” It’s almost weirdly emboldening, in a way. If she thinks of it as a random act of fate, then the flimsiness of her own mortality is difficult to contemplate. But – even though she knows it’s probably just some of his weird guilt complex talking – if this is some kind of cosmic price she has to pay for being with Solas, then. Well. Yeah. She’ll look death in the face and turn back around for him.

Gladly.

Even if he is still very wrong about bagels, and probably always will be.

“I would rather you were not hurt,” Solas insists. “Not ever, but especially not because of me.”

“Getting hurt’s kind of unavoidable, sometimes,” she points out, swallowing. If he keeps crying on her then _she’s_ going to start crying, too, and then where will they be? “And hey, it’s not your fault. It really isn’t. It was a freak accident, vhenan. You’re just the unexpected bonus, because now I get to have you fussing over me until I feel better.”

She brushes a hand across his head again. Her ribs are still sore, but she doesn’t need to ask him to move yet.

He lets out a breath, and looks up at her.

“I will endeavour to do an exemplary job of fussing,” he promises.

She grins, and leans forward enough to kiss the bridge of his nose.

“Then go eat,” she tells him. “And afterwards come back and read to me.”

He raises an eyebrow at that.

“And particular requests?” he wonders, finally settling back. His eyes are red, and his cheeks are damp. But his breaths are steadier, now.

“I’ll decide when you come back,” she says, glancing over at the narrow book case in his bedroom.

In the end, though, as soon as he’s gone from the room her exhaustion crashes into her like it was just waiting for an opportune moment to strike. She settles back against Solas pillows, breathing in the familiar scent of him, and her eyelids droop shut. Her mind helpfully summons up the memory of that flash of red in the corner of her vision, and the bruises on her calves throb painfully.

She opens her eyes again, but not for long. Eventually she manages to close them, and drift somewhere past her various aches, into sleep again. Her dreams are weird and disjointed. At some point she wakes up just enough to be aware of Solas in the room. Solas’ hand on her forehead, his voice soothing in her ears.

She wakes to his voice a second time, much later.

It’s raised in agitation, now.

“Do you think I am a fool?” he demands, loud enough that she can hear him even through the closed bedroom door. “Let me make it perfectly clear. You are not coming. You are not welcome. And if another _unfortunate incident_ should happen, you will learn just how _difficult_ I can really be.”

There’s a pause. Footsteps, light passing under the door. It’s dark, she realizes. What time is it? She winces as she tries to roll over, and glances at the bedside clock. Two… two in the _morning?_ Who is Solas yelling at one the phone at two o’clock in the morning?

His voice goes down, but then rises again.

“So you _do_ know!” he snaps. And then, “I am not playing this game, Mythal. I am not leaping for the bait. Whether or not you personally had anything to do with it, I refuse to let you take advantage…”

His voice fades out, and she leans back against the pillows, and lets out a breath. Runs her free hand across her face. Her left arm itches, and her painkillers have worn off. Her mouth feels like it’s been stuffed with cotton, but as the seconds tick by, her mind gets a lot sharper. Mythal? That’s Solas’ foster mother, she recalls. One of his family that are supposed to be coming from the wedding. The terrifyingly wealthy, questionable crowd from Tevinter.

He… thinks his family had something to do with her accident?

 _That’s insane,_ she decides. Why would they?

 _Because you’re some humble Dalish bagel-maker, maybe, and he’s the protégé of some weird rich elven crime family?_ her mind helpfully supplies.

 _That makes no sense. Solas is pretty much a humble bagel-maker, too,_ she reminds herself. No matter where he’s come from, that’s clearly the life he’s chosen. Maybe he’s just… overreacting? Assuming the worst?

She thinks about the stolen car that hit her, and the missing driver. None of his family’s even in town yet, though. That she knows. Would she know?

It occurs to her that if Solas’ family _is_ responsible for this, then someone might try and hit her with a car again.

 _Shit,_ she thinks.

She’s gonna have to step up her game if she’s going to fight off these terrifying rich elves.


End file.
